Multidimensional Visualization of Sound-Sense Harmony for Shakespeare's Sonnets Classification

In this paper we focus on the association of sound and sense harmony in the collection of sonnets written by Shakespeare in the XVI° beginning of XVII° century and propose a new four-dimensional representation to visualize them by means of the system called SPARSAR. To compute the degree of harmony and disharmony, we have automatically extracted the sound grids of all the sonnets and have combined them with the semantics and polarity expressed by their contents. We explain in details the algorithm and show the representation of the whole collection of 154 sonnets and comment them extensively. In a second experiment, we use data from manual annotation of the sonnets for Satire detection using the Appraisal Theory Framework, to gauge the system's accuracy in matching these data with the output of the automatic algorithm for sound-sense harmony. The results obtained with an 94.6% accuracy confirm the obvious fact that the poet has to account for both sound and meaning in the choice of words.