# Aruz scansion of Ottoman poetry

Ottoman Divan poetry is written in aruz, a quantitative meter that counts each syllable as long or short, and modern Turkish spelling drops the marks that record long vowels, so length has to be inferred from context. A lattice-based hidden Markov model lays out candidate scholarly spellings of each word together with linking and lengthening choices as paths, is trained by EM from each poem's printed meter, and scans 77.6% of held-out lines fully correctly, against 26.8% for a rule-based scanner, 55.0% for a neural tagger trained with the same supervision and 63.6% for Claude Opus 5.5 few-shot on the same 500 lines. The code is open-sourced and the tool is released on the web.

Ottoman Divan poetry is written in aruz, a quantitative meter that counts each syllable as long or short, and modern Turkish spelling drops the marks that record long vowels, so length has to be inferred from context. A lattice-based hidden Markov model lays out candidate scholarly spellings of each word together with linking and lengthening choices as paths, is trained by EM from each poem's printed meter, and scans 77.6% of held-out lines fully correctly, against 26.8% for a rule-based scanner, 55.0% for a neural tagger trained with the same supervision and 63.6% for Claude Opus 5.5 few-shot on the same 500 lines. The code is open-sourced and the tool is released on the web.