MetricalARGS: Studying Metrical Poetry with LLMs

Chalamalasetti Kranti, Sowmya Vajjala


Abstract
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.
Anthology ID:
2026.wildre-1.1
Volume:
Proceedings of the 8th Workshop on Indian Language Data: Resources and Evaluation
Month:
May
Year:
2026
Address:
Palma, Mallorca, Spain
Editors:
Girish Nath Jha, Kalika Bali, Sobha L, Devendr Kumar
Venues:
WILDRE | WS
SIG:
Publisher:
ELRA Language Resources Association (ELRA)
Note:
Pages:
1–13
Language:
External URL:
https://lrec.elra.info/lrec2026-ws-wildre-01
DOI:
10.63317/4o3nvxw6qwso
Bibkey:
Cite (ACL):
Chalamalasetti Kranti and Sowmya Vajjala. 2026. MetricalARGS: Studying Metrical Poetry with LLMs. In Proceedings of the 8th Workshop on Indian Language Data: Resources and Evaluation, pages 1–13, Palma, Mallorca, Spain. ELRA Language Resources Association (ELRA).
Cite (Informal):
MetricalARGS: Studying Metrical Poetry with LLMs (Kranti & Vajjala, WILDRE 2026)
Copy Citation: