A Method for Extracting Semantic Information from On-line Art Music Discussion Forums

In this paper a method for extracting semantic information from online music discussion forums is proposed. The semantic relations are inferred from the co-occurrence of musical concepts in forum posts, using network analysis. The method starts by defining a dictionary of common music terms in an art music tradition. Then, it creates a complex network representation of the online forum by matching such dictionary against the forum posts. Once the complex network is built we can study different network measures, including node relevance, node co-occurrence and term relations via semantically connecting words. Moreover, we can detect communities of concepts inside the forum posts. The rationale is that some music terms are more related to each other than to other terms. All in all, this methodology allows us to obtain meaningful and relevant information from forum discussions.