In recent years, there has been impressive progress in the automatic analysis of Spanish verse. However, despite the excellent results of previous attempts, there is still room for improvement, as this article shows. It presents libEscansión, a new automatic scansion tool that, although initially designed for analysing the verses of plays, outperforms all its predecessors in the scansion of fixed-meter poetry. The library uses two novel approaches to achieve this result: linguistically, it uses Castilian syllabification instead of the more diphthong-prone American syllabic division. It uses a dedicated module that can also be run independently. Methodologically, the library resolves metrical ambiguities using a perceptibility-based recursive prioritisation system. The combination of both allows libEscansión to perform a scansion 0.78% more accurately than the best of its peers against a gold standard corpus, reaching an accuracy of 97.01% (99.50% discarding non-erroneous disagreements).
Fernando Sanz-Lázaro (Fri,) studied this question.