Lyric Text Mining in Music Mood Classification

This research examines the role lyric text can play in improving audio music mood classification. A new method is proposed to build a large ground truth set of 5,585 songs and 18 mood categories based on social tags so as to reflect a realistic, user-centered perspective. A relatively complete set of lyric features and representation models were investigated. The best performing lyric feature set was also compared to a leading audio-based system. In combining lyric and audio sources, hybrid feature sets built with three different feature selection methods were also examined. The results show patterns at odds with findings in previous studies: audio features do not always outperform lyrics features, and combining lyrics and audio features can improve performance in many mood categories, but not all of them.