Nordic Music Genre Classification Using Song Lyrics

Lyrics-based music genre classification is still understudied within the music information retrieval community. The existing approaches, reported in the literature, only deals with lyrics in the English language. Thus, it is necessary to evaluate if the standard text classification techniques are suitable for lyrics in languages other than English. More precisely, in this work we are interested in analyzing which approach gives better results: a language-dependent approach using stemming and stopwords removal or a language-independent approach using n-grams. To perform the experiments we have created the Nordic music genre lyrics database. The analysis of the experimental results shows that using a language-independent approach with the n-gram representation is better than using a language-dependent approach with stemming. Additional experiments using stylistic features were also performed. The analysis of these additional experiments has shown that using stylistic features combined with the other approaches improve the classification results.