When attempting to annotate music, it is important to consider both acoustic content and social context. This paper explores techniques for collecting and combining multiple sources of such information for the purpose of building a query-by-text music retrieval system. We consider two representations of the acoustic content (related to timbre and harmony) and two social sources (social tags and web documents). We then compare three algorithms that combine these information sources: calibrated score averaging (CSA), RankBoost, and kernel combination support vector machines (KC-SVM). We demonstrate empirically that each of these algorithms is superior to algorithms that use individual information sources. Categories and Subject Descriptors H.3.1 [Information Storage and Retrieval]: Content Analysis and Indexing; I.2.m [Computing Methodologies]: Artificial Intelligence; J.5 [Computer Applications]: Arts and Humanities—Music General Terms Algorithms, Design, Experimentation Keywords co...
Douglas Turnbull, Luke Barrington, Gert R. G. Lanc