Learning Contextualized Music Semantics from Tags via a Siamese Neural Network

Music information retrieval faces a challenge in modeling contextualized musical concepts formulated by a set of co-occurring tags. In this article, we investigate the suitability of our recently proposed approach based on a Siamese neural network in fighting off this challenge. By means of tag features and probabilistic topic models, the network captures contextualized semantics from tags via unsupervised learning. This leads to a distributed semantics space and a potential solution to the out of vocabulary problem, which has yet to be sufficiently addressed. We explore the nature of the resultant music-based semantics and address computational needs. We conduct experiments on three public music tag collections—namely, CAL500, MagTag5K and Million Song Dataset—and compare our approach to a number of state-of-the-art semantics learning approaches. Comparative results suggest that this approach outperforms previous approaches in terms of semantic priming and music tag completion.