The WASABI song corpus and knowledge graph for music lyrics analysis

Abstract

We present the WASABI Song Corpus, a large corpus of songs enriched with metadata extracted from music databases on the Web, and resulting from the processing of song lyrics and from audio analysis. More specifically, given that lyrics encode an important part of the semantics of a song, we focus here on the description of the methods we proposed to extract relevant information from the lyrics, such as their structure segmentation, their topics, the explicitness of the lyrics content, the salient passages of a song and the emotions conveyed. The corpus contains 1.73M songs with lyrics (1.41M unique lyrics) annotated at different levels with the output of the above mentioned methods. The corpus labels and the provided methods can be exploited by music search engines and music professionals (e.g. journalists, radio presenters) to better handle large collections of lyrics, allowing an intelligent browsing, categorization and recommendation of songs. We demonstrate the utility and versatility of the WASABI Song Corpus in three concrete application scenarios. Together with the work on the corpus, we present the work achieved to transition the dataset into a knowledge graph, the WASABI RDF Knowledge Graph, and we show how this will enable an even richer set of applications.