Extracting Semantic Information from an Online Carnatic Music Forum

By mining user-generated text content we can obtain musicrelated information that could not otherwise be extracted from audio signals or symbolic score representations. In this paper we propose a methodology for extracting music-related semantic information from an online discussion forum, rasikas.org, dedicated to the Carnatic music tradition. We first define a dictionary of relevant terms within categories such as raagas, taalas, performers, composers, and instruments, and create a complex network representation by matching such dictionary against the forum posts. This network representation is used to identify popular terms within the forum, as well as relevant co-occurrences and semantic relationships. This way, for instance, we are able to learn the instrument played by a performer with 95% accuracy, to discover the confusion between two raagas with different naming conventions, or to infer semantic relationships regarding lineage or musical influence. This contribution is a first step towards the automatic creation of ontologies for specific musical cultures.