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MetricalARGS: Studying Metrical Poetry with LLMs

Many classical languages have well-studied traditions of poetic meter which enforce constraints on a poem in terms of syllable and phoneme patterns. Such advanced literary forms offer opportunities for probing deeper reasoning and language understanding in Large Language Models (LLMs) and their ability to follow strict pre-requisites and rules in generating text. In this paper, we introduce MetricalARGS, the first taxonomy of poetry-related NLP tasks designed to evaluate LLMs on metrical poetry across four dimensions: Analysis, Retrieval, Generation, and Support. We discuss how these tasks relate to existing NLP tasks, addressing questions around datasets and evaluation metrics. Taking the metrical poetry of Telugu language as our example, we illustrate how the taxonomy can be used with LLMs in practice through a quantitative and qualitative evaluation. MetricalARGS highlights the broader possibilities for understanding the capabilities and limitations of today’s LLMs through the lens of metrical poetry. We believe MetricalARGS can also serve as a reference taxonomy for studying and comparing metrical poetry across Indian languages as a starting point, and can be extended to other languages with established metrical poetry traditions.