Design and Development of an Automated Tool for Determining the Presence and Extent of Rhyme in Free Verse

Free verse is a type of poetry that is free of metre or rhyme requirements. Rhyme has become an essential part of poems to a great extent due to its phonetic characteristics. Although it is not a necessity in free verse compositions, for many reasons, it has been present in these compositions, maybe in an irregular fashion. This article focuses on the quantification of rhyme in free verse poems. Much has been researched in the domain of Hindi poetry in the past few years. Most of them are focused on the classification of poetry on the basis of mood or metre. The state of art model, RPAGen, for rhyme detection in Hindi poetry does not work for free verse compositions. In this article, considering rhyme as the parameter, its presence in free verse compositions has been determined and subsequently analyzed using suitable statistical tests to establish the existing style of three renowned poets of Hindi literature. A novel scheme followed by an automated tool (FVRCal) is proposed to quantify the extent of rhyme. The statistical results obtained by the experiment are then used to establish commonality and diversity among the writing styles of the three candidate poets