The BALAGHA Score: A Quantitative Linguistics Approach to the Analysis of Arabic Rhetoric

Presentation slides from the 13th International Quantitative Linguistics Conference (QUALICO 2025), held at the Faculty of Arts, Masaryk University, Brno, Czech Republic, 26–28 June 2025. These slides accompanied the oral presentation titled “The BALAGHA Score: A Quantitative Linguistics Approach to Arabic Rhetorical Analysis” delivered by Mandar Marathe at the conference on 26 June 2025. The talk introduced a novel quantitative linguistics metric called "Rhetorical Density" for quantifying the rhetoricity of texts in any language. Rhetorical Density (or Rhetoric Density) is defined as the number of rhetorical devices in a text, divided by the word count of the text, multiplied by 100. The presentation also proposed a framework called the BALAGHA Score for measuring the Rhetorical Density of Arabic texts in particular. For the related abstract, see: https://doi.org/10.5281/zenodo.15765026 This presentation is part of the ongoing BALAGHA Score project, which includes online tools, corpus development, and a forthcoming full manuscript. For project resources, visit: https://al-Balagha.com (Encyclopedia of Arabic Rhetoric) https://BalaghaScore.com (Main project website with online tools) https://Balagha-Corpus.com (Arabic texts annotated with rhetorical devices) DOI: 10.5281/zenodo.15765272