Syntactic Topic Models

The syntactic topic model (STM) is a Bayesian nonparametric model of language that discovers latent distributions of words (topics) that are both semantically and syntactically coherent. The STM models dependency parsed corpora where sentences are grouped into documents. It assumes that each word is drawn from a latent topic chosen by combining document-level features and the local syntactic context. Each document has a distribution over latent topics, as in topic models, which provides the semantic consistency. Each element in the dependency parse tree also has a distribution over the topics of its children, as in latent-state syntax models, which provides the syntactic consistency. These distributions are convolved so that the topic of each word is likely under both its document and syntactic context. We derive a fast posterior inference algorithm based on variational methods. We report qualitative and quantitative studies on both synthetic data and hand-parsed documents. We show that the STM is a more predictive model of language than current models based only on syntax or only on topics

Improving automatic music transcription through key detection

In this paper, a method for automatic transcription of polyphonic music is proposed that exploits key information. The proposed system performs key detection using a matching technique with distributions of pitch class pairs, called Zweiklang profiles. The automatic transcription system is based on probabilistic latent component analysis, supporting templates from multiple instruments, as well as tuning deviations and frequency modulations. Key information is incorporated to the transcription system using Dirichlet priors during the parameter update stage. Experiments are performed on a polyphonic, multiple-instrument dataset of Bach chorales, where it is shown that incorporating key information improves multi-pitch detection and instrument assignment performance

Statistical Aspects of Music Mining: Naive Dictionary Representation

Extensive studies have been conducted on both musical scores and audio tracks of western classical music with the finality of learning and detecting the key in which a particular piece of music was played. Both the Bayesian Approach and modern unsupervised learning via latent Dirichlet allocation have been used for such learning tasks. In this research work, we propose and develop the novel idea of treating musical sheets as literary documents in the traditional text analytics parlance, to fully benefit from the vast amount of research already existing in statistical text mining and topic modeling. We specifically introduce the idea of representing any given piece of music as a collection of musical words that we codenamed muselets , which are essentially musical words of various lengths. Given the novelty and therefore the extremely difficulty of properly forming a complete version of a dictionary of muselets, the present paper focuses on a simpler albeit naive version of the ultimate dictionary, which we refer to as a Naive Dictionary because of the fact that all the words are of the same length. We specifically herein construct a naive dictionary featuring a corpus made up of African American, Chinese, Japanese and Arabic music, on which we perform both supervised and unsupervised learning. For the exploration of pattern recognition and topic modeling, we venture out of the traditional western classical music and embrace and explore other music genres. We consider the musical score sheets and audio tracks of some of the giants of jazz like Duke Ellington, Miles Davis, John Coltrane, Dizzie Gillespie, Wes Montgomery, Charlie Parker, Sonny Rollins, Louis Armstrong, Bill Evans, Dave Brubeck, Thelonious Monk. We specifically employ Bayesian techniques and modern topic modeling methods to explore tasks such as: automatic improvisation detection, genre identification, and key detection. Although some of the results based on the Naive Dictionary are reasonably good, we anticipate phenomenal predictive performances once we get around to actually build a full scale complete version of our intended dictionary of muselets

Sequential decision making in artificial musical intelligence

Over the past 60 years, artificial intelligence has grown from a largely academic field of research to a ubiquitous array of tools and approaches used in everyday technology. Despite its many recent successes and growing prevalence, certain meaningful facets of computational intelligence have not been as thoroughly explored. Such additional facets cover a wide array of complex mental tasks which humans carry out easily, yet are difficult for computers to mimic. A prime example of a domain in which human intelligence thrives, but machine understanding is still fairly limited, is music. Over the last decade, many researchers have applied computational tools to carry out tasks such as genre identification, music summarization, music database querying, and melodic segmentation. While these are all useful algorithmic solutions, we are still a long way from constructing complete music agents, able to mimic (at least partially) the complexity with which humans approach music. One key aspect which hasn't been sufficiently studied is that of sequential decision making in musical intelligence. This thesis strives to answer the following question: Can a sequential decision making perspective guide us in the creation of better music agents, and social agents in general? And if so, how? More specifically, this thesis focuses on two aspects of musical intelligence: music recommendation and human-agent (and more generally agent-agent) interaction in the context of music. The key contributions of this thesis are the design of better music playlist recommendation algorithms; the design of algorithms for tracking user preferences over time; new approaches for modeling people's behavior in situations that involve music; and the design of agents capable of meaningful interaction with humans and other agents in a setting where music plays a roll (either directly or indirectly). Though motivated primarily by music-related tasks, and focusing largely on people's musical preferences, this thesis also establishes that insights from music-specific case studies can also be applicable in other concrete social domains, such as different types of content recommendation. Showing the generality of insights from musical data in other contexts serves as evidence for the utility of music domains as testbeds for the development of general artificial intelligence techniques. Ultimately, this thesis demonstrates the overall usefulness of taking a sequential decision making approach in settings previously unexplored from this perspectiveComputer Science

Supervised Symbolic Music Style Translation Using Synthetic Data

International audienceResearch on style transfer and domain translation has clearly demonstrated the ability of deep learning-based algorithms to manipulate images in terms of artistic style. More recently, several attempts have been made to extend such approaches to music (both symbolic and audio) in order to enable transforming musical style in a similar manner. In this study, we focus on symbolic music with the goal of altering the 'style' of a piece while keeping its original 'content'. As opposed to the current methods, which are inherently restricted to be unsupervised due to the lack of 'aligned' data (i.e. the same musical piece played in multiple styles), we develop the first fully supervised algorithm for this task. At the core of our approach lies a synthetic data generation scheme which allows us to produce virtually unlimited amounts of aligned data, and hence avoid the above issue. In view of this data generation scheme, we propose an encoder-decoder model for translating symbolic music accompaniments between a number of different styles. Our experiments show that our models, although trained entirely on synthetic data, are capable of producing musically meaningful accompaniments even for real (non-synthetic) MIDI recordings

Transforming Graph Representations for Statistical Relational Learning

Relational data representations have become an increasingly important topic due to the recent proliferation of network datasets (e.g., social, biological, information networks) and a corresponding increase in the application of statistical relational learning (SRL) algorithms to these domains. In this article, we examine a range of representation issues for graph-based relational data. Since the choice of relational data representation for the nodes, links, and features can dramatically affect the capabilities of SRL algorithms, we survey approaches and opportunities for relational representation transformation designed to improve the performance of these algorithms. This leads us to introduce an intuitive taxonomy for data representation transformations in relational domains that incorporates link transformation and node transformation as symmetric representation tasks. In particular, the transformation tasks for both nodes and links include (i) predicting their existence, (ii) predicting their label or type, (iii) estimating their weight or importance, and (iv) systematically constructing their relevant features. We motivate our taxonomy through detailed examples and use it to survey and compare competing approaches for each of these tasks. We also discuss general conditions for transforming links, nodes, and features. Finally, we highlight challenges that remain to be addressed