One of the prime areas of research for the Search Inside the Music project here in the labs has been to try to predict things about music based upon the audio signal alone.  We use signal processing and machine learning to classify or label tracks.  This can be useful for building a recommender that has to work with a large amount of new music (a particular problem for social recommenders). 

One particularly fruitful area of research has been in predicting what social tags will be applied to a particular track.  By mining social music sites like last.fm we can gather a large number of social tags that we can then use to train a system to predict the tags for new music.  These predicted tags (we call them autotags) can then be used along with traditionally applied social tags to incorporate new music into a social recommender, avoiding the 'cold-start' problem common in social recommenders.

This work is being presented at NIPS 2007 in the paper: Automatic Generation of Social Tags for Music Recommendation (Eck, Lamere, Bertin-Mahieux, Green).  Here's the abstract:

Social tags are user-generated keywords associated with some resource on the Web. In the case of music, social tags have become an important component of  “Web2.0” recommender systems, allowing users to generate playlists based on use-dependent terms such as chill or jogging that have been applied to particular songs. In this paper, we propose a method for predicting these social tags directly from MP3 files. Using a set of boosted classifiers, we map audio features onto social tags collected from the Web. The resulting automatic tags (or autotags) furnish information about music that is otherwise untagged or poorly tagged, allowing for insertion of previously unheard music into a social recommender. This avoids the ”cold-start problem” common in such systems. Autotags can also be used to smooth the tag space from which similarities and recommendations are  made by providing a set of comparable baseline tags for all tracks in a recommender system. 


Comments:

Paul,

Great stuff. You are in Massachusetts? I am looking for someone local to talk about market segmentation in music; as you can imagine segmenting fans based upon demographic data is pointless. I will buy the coffee and/or the lunch if you have some time to spend. My motivation is centered around creating something like a record label but not... Creating an ecosystem around a cluster of music is what I am thinking about. I am not recruiting, just looking for smart friends.

Drop me a note when you get a chance.

Thanks - Bruce

Posted by Bruce Warila on December 05, 2007 at 09:45 AM EST #

Post a Comment:
Comments are closed for this entry.

This blog copyright 2010 by plamere