A Natural Language Dialogue System for Impression-based Music Retrieval

Impression-based music retrieval is the best way to find pieces of music that suit the preferences, senses, or mental states of users. A natural language interface (NLI) is more useful and effective than a graphical user interface for impression-based music retrieval since an NLI interprets users’ spontaneous input sentences to represent musical impressions and generates query vectors for music retrieval. Existing impression-based music retrieval systems, however, have no dialogue capabilities for modifying the most recently used query vector. We evaluated a natural language dialogue system we developed that deals not only with 164 impression words but also with 14 comparative expressions, such as “a little more” and “more and more,” and, if necessary, modifies the most recently used query vector through a dialogue. We also evaluated performance using 35 participants to determine the effectiveness of our dialogue system.