From Joy to Fear: A Benchmark of Emotion Estimation in Pop Song Lyrics

Fuente: arXiv
Saved in:
Bibliographic Details
Main Authors: Dahary, Shay, Edana, Avi, Apartsin, Alexander, Aperstein, Yehudit
Format: Preprint
Published: 2025
Subjects:
Online Access:
Tags: Add Tag
No Tags, Be the first to tag this record!
_version_ 1866915483037466624
author Dahary, Shay
Edana, Avi
Apartsin, Alexander
Aperstein, Yehudit
author_facet Dahary, Shay
Edana, Avi
Apartsin, Alexander
Aperstein, Yehudit
contents The emotional content of song lyrics plays a pivotal role in shaping listener experiences and influencing musical preferences. This paper investigates the task of multi-label emotional attribution of song lyrics by predicting six emotional intensity scores corresponding to six fundamental emotions. A manually labeled dataset is constructed using a mean opinion score (MOS) approach, which aggregates annotations from multiple human raters to ensure reliable ground-truth labels. Leveraging this dataset, we conduct a comprehensive evaluation of several publicly available large language models (LLMs) under zero-shot scenarios. Additionally, we fine-tune a BERT-based model specifically for predicting multi-label emotion scores. Experimental results reveal the relative strengths and limitations of zero-shot and fine-tuned models in capturing the nuanced emotional content of lyrics. Our findings highlight the potential of LLMs for emotion recognition in creative texts, providing insights into model selection strategies for emotion-based music information retrieval applications. The labeled dataset is available at https://github.com/LLM-HITCS25S/LyricsEmotionAttribution.
format Preprint
id arxiv_https___arxiv_org_abs_2509_05617
institution arXiv
publishDate 2025
record_format arxiv
spellingShingle From Joy to Fear: A Benchmark of Emotion Estimation in Pop Song Lyrics
Dahary, Shay
Edana, Avi
Apartsin, Alexander
Aperstein, Yehudit
Computation and Language
Artificial Intelligence
The emotional content of song lyrics plays a pivotal role in shaping listener experiences and influencing musical preferences. This paper investigates the task of multi-label emotional attribution of song lyrics by predicting six emotional intensity scores corresponding to six fundamental emotions. A manually labeled dataset is constructed using a mean opinion score (MOS) approach, which aggregates annotations from multiple human raters to ensure reliable ground-truth labels. Leveraging this dataset, we conduct a comprehensive evaluation of several publicly available large language models (LLMs) under zero-shot scenarios. Additionally, we fine-tune a BERT-based model specifically for predicting multi-label emotion scores. Experimental results reveal the relative strengths and limitations of zero-shot and fine-tuned models in capturing the nuanced emotional content of lyrics. Our findings highlight the potential of LLMs for emotion recognition in creative texts, providing insights into model selection strategies for emotion-based music information retrieval applications. The labeled dataset is available at https://github.com/LLM-HITCS25S/LyricsEmotionAttribution.
title From Joy to Fear: A Benchmark of Emotion Estimation in Pop Song Lyrics
topic Computation and Language
Artificial Intelligence
url https://arxiv.org/abs/2509.05617