Multiple Lyrics Alignment: Automatic Retrieval of Song Lyrics

We present an approach to automatically retrieve and extract lyrics of arbitrary songs from the Internet. It is intended to provide easy and convenient access to lyrics for users, as well as a basis for further research based on lyrics, e.g. semantic analysis. Due to the fact that many lyrics found on the web suffer from individual errors like typos, we make use of multiple versions from different sources to eliminate mistakes. This is accomplished by Multiple Sequence Alignment. The different sites are aligned and examined for matching sequences of words, finding those parts on the pages that are likely to contain the lyrics. This provides a means to find the most probable version of lyrics, i.e. a version with highest consensus among different sources.

• Type: Conference
• Year: 2005
• Where: ISMIR
• Authors: Peter Knees, Markus Schedl, Gerhard Widmer
• Keywords: Arbitrary Songs, Information Retrieval, ISMIR 2005, Lyrics, Multiple Sequence Alignment