Redif Extraction in Handwritten Ottoman Literary Texts

Repeated patterns, rhymes and redifs, are among the fundamental building blocks of Ottoman Divan poetry. They provide integrity of a poem by connecting its parts and bring a melody to its voice. In Ottoman literature, poets wrote their works by making use of the rhymes and redifs of previous poems according to the nazire (creative imitation) tradition either to prove their expertise or to show respect towards old masters. Automatic recognition of redifs would provide important data mining opportunities in literary analyses of Ottoman poetry where the majority of it is in handwritten form. In this study, we propose a matching criterion and method, Red if Extraction using Contour Segments (RECS) using the proposed matching criterion, that detects redifs in handwritten Ottoman literary texts using only visual analysis. Our method provides a success rate of 0.682 in a test collection of 100 poems.