Solving Misheard Lyric Search Queries using a Probabilistic Model of Speech Sounds
Hussein Hirjee and Daniel G. Brown
People often use lyrics to find songs – and they get them wrong. Some examples ‘Nirvana’ = “Don’t walk on guns, burn your friends”. Approach: look at using phonetic similarity. They adapt ‘blast’ from DNA sequence matching to the problem. Lyrics are represented as a sequence of matrix.
For training, they get data from ‘misheard lyrics’ sites like KissThisGuy.com. They align the misheard with the real lyrics – to build a model of frequently misheard phonemes. They tested with KissThisGuy.com misheard lyrics. Scored with 5 different models.
Evaluation: Mean Reciprocal Rank and Hit Rank by Rank. The approach compared well with previous techniques. Still, 17% of lyrics are still not identified – some are just bad queries, but dealing with short queries is a source of errors. They also looked at phoneme confusion, in particular confusions caused by singing.
Future work: look at phoneme trigrams, and build a web site. Quesitioner suggests that they create a mondegreen generator
Good presentation, interesting, fun problem area.
Music Machinery 