Assessing Fine-Grained Explicitness of Song Lyrics

Abstract

Music plays a crucial role in our lives, with growing consumption and engagement through streaming services and social media platforms. However, caution is needed for children, who may be exposed to explicit content through songs. Initiatives such as the Parental Advisory Label (PAL) and similar labelling from streaming content providers aim to protect children from harmful content. However, so far, the labelling has been limited to tagging the song as explicit (if so), without providing any additional information on the reasons for the explicitness (e.g., strong language, sexual reference). This paper addresses this issue by developing a system capable of detecting explicit song lyrics and assessing the kind of explicit content detected. The novel contributions of the work include (i) a new dataset of 4000 song lyrics annotated with five possible reasons for content explicitness and (ii) experiments with machine learning classifiers to predict explicitness and the reasons for it. The results demonstrated the feasibility of automatically detecting explicit content and the reasons for explicitness in song lyrics. This work is the first to address explicitness at this level of detail and provides a valuable contribution to the music industry, helping to protect children from exposure to inappropriate content.

Keywords

• text classification
• multi-label tagging
• explicit content detection
• natural language processing