Eigenmood Space: Uncertainty-Aware Spectral Graph Analysis of Psychological Patterns in Classical Persian Poetry

TL;DR

This paper introduces an uncertainty-aware spectral graph analysis framework for studying psychological patterns in classical Persian poetry, enabling scalable, interpretable, and cautious poet-level insights from large verse datasets.

Contribution

It presents a novel computational approach combining confidence-weighted evidence, divergence measures, and spectral embeddings to analyze poetic psychology with uncertainty quantification.

Findings

22.2% of verses are abstained, highlighting the importance of uncertainty.

The framework effectively captures poetic individuality through divergence measures.

Spectral embeddings reveal meaningful psychological axes in poetry.

Abstract

Classical Persian poetry is a historically sustained archive in which affective life is expressed through metaphor, intertextual convention, and rhetorical indirection. These properties make close reading indispensable while limiting reproducible comparison at scale. We present an uncertainty-aware computational framework for poet-level psychological analysis based on large-scale automatic multi-label annotation. Each verse is associated with a set of psychological concepts, per-label confidence scores, and an abstention flag that signals insufficient evidence. We aggregate confidence-weighted evidence into a Poet $\times$ Concept matrix, interpret each poet as a probability distribution over concepts, and quantify poetic individuality as divergence from a corpus baseline using Jensen--Shannon divergence and Kullback--Leibler divergence. To capture relational structure beyond marginals, we build a confidence-weighted co-occurrence graph over concepts and define an Eigenmood embedding through Laplacian spectral decomposition. On a corpus of 61{,}573 verses across 10 poets, 22.2\% of verses are abstained, underscoring the analytical importance of uncertainty. We further report sensitivity analysis under confidence thresholding, selection-bias diagnostics that treat abstention as a category, and a distant-to-close workflow that retrieves verse-level exemplars along Eigenmood axes. The resulting framework supports scalable, auditable digital-humanities analysis while preserving interpretive caution by propagating uncertainty from verse-level evidence to poet-level inference.