Abstract
How useful are topic models based on song lyrics for applications in music information retrieval? Unsupervised topic models on text corpora are often difficult to interpret. Based on a large collection of lyrics, we investigate how well automatically generated topics are related to manual topic annotations. We propose to use the kurtosis metric to align unsupervised topics with a reference model of supervised topics. This metric is well-suited for topic assessments, as it turns out to be more strongly correlated with manual topic quality scores than existing measures for semantic coherence. We also show how it can be used for a detailed graphical topic quality assessment.
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Sterckx, L., Demeester, T., Deleu, J., Mertens, L., Develder, C. (2014). Assessing Quality of Unsupervised Topics in Song Lyrics. In: de Rijke, M., et al. Advances in Information Retrieval. ECIR 2014. Lecture Notes in Computer Science, vol 8416. Springer, Cham. https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-319-06028-6_55
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DOI: https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-319-06028-6_55
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