Descriptive Music Search With Domain-Specific Word Embeddings
Alva Liu · KTH Publication Database DiVA (KTH Royal Institute of Technology) · 2019
Descriptive search is a type of exploratory search that allows users to search for content by providing descriptors. Instead of having a specific target in mind, the user looks for a recommendation of items that matches the given descriptors. However in the music domain, descriptive words do not necessarily have the same semantic meaning as they have in a generic text corpus. In this study, we investigate if we can train a shallow neural model on playlist data for descriptive music search, and if the model can capture music-specific word semantics. We carry out three experiments to evaluate our model. The first and the second experiments evaluate if the model can predict tracks that are relevant to given search queries, and the third experiment evaluates whether the model successfully captures domain-specific word semantics. From our experiments, we conclude that our model trained on playlist data indeed can capture music-specific word semantics and generate reasonable track predictions. For future work, we suggest to explore possibilities to re-rank the top results retrieved by the model and diversify and/or personalize the ordering of the results.