1,526 research outputs found
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
MARBLE: Music Audio Representation Benchmark for Universal Evaluation
In the era of extensive intersection between art and Artificial Intelligence (AI), such as image generation and fiction co-creation, AI for music remains relatively nascent, particularly in music understanding. This is evident in the limited work on deep music representations, the scarcity of large-scale datasets, and the absence of a universal and community-driven benchmark. To address this issue, we introduce the Music Audio Representation Benchmark for universaL Evaluation, termed MARBLE. It aims to provide a benchmark for various Music Information Retrieval (MIR) tasks by defining a comprehensive taxonomy with four hierarchy levels, including acoustic, performance, score, and high-level description. We then establish a unified protocol based on 14 tasks on 8 public-available datasets, providing a fair and standard assessment of representations of all open-sourced pre-trained models developed on music recordings as baselines. Besides, MARBLE offers an easy-to-use, extendable, and reproducible suite for the community, with a clear statement on copyright issues on datasets. Results suggest recently proposed large-scale pre-trained musical language models perform the best in most tasks, with room for further improvement. The leaderboard and toolkit repository are published at this https URL to promote future music AI research
Text-based Sentiment Analysis and Music Emotion Recognition
Nowadays, with the expansion of social media, large amounts of user-generated
texts like tweets, blog posts or product reviews are shared online. Sentiment polarity
analysis of such texts has become highly attractive and is utilized in recommender
systems, market predictions, business intelligence and more. We also witness deep
learning techniques becoming top performers on those types of tasks. There are
however several problems that need to be solved for efficient use of deep neural
networks on text mining and text polarity analysis.
First of all, deep neural networks are data hungry. They need to be fed with
datasets that are big in size, cleaned and preprocessed as well as properly labeled.
Second, the modern natural language processing concept of word embeddings as a
dense and distributed text feature representation solves sparsity and dimensionality
problems of the traditional bag-of-words model. Still, there are various uncertainties
regarding the use of word vectors: should they be generated from the same dataset
that is used to train the model or it is better to source them from big and popular
collections that work as generic text feature representations? Third, it is not easy for
practitioners to find a simple and highly effective deep learning setup for various
document lengths and types. Recurrent neural networks are weak with longer texts
and optimal convolution-pooling combinations are not easily conceived. It is thus
convenient to have generic neural network architectures that are effective and can
adapt to various texts, encapsulating much of design complexity.
This thesis addresses the above problems to provide methodological and practical
insights for utilizing neural networks on sentiment analysis of texts and achieving
state of the art results. Regarding the first problem, the effectiveness of various
crowdsourcing alternatives is explored and two medium-sized and emotion-labeled
song datasets are created utilizing social tags. One of the research interests of Telecom
Italia was the exploration of relations between music emotional stimulation and
driving style. Consequently, a context-aware music recommender system that aims
to enhance driving comfort and safety was also designed. To address the second
problem, a series of experiments with large text collections of various contents and
domains were conducted. Word embeddings of different parameters were exercised
and results revealed that their quality is influenced (mostly but not only) by the
size of texts they were created from. When working with small text datasets, it is
thus important to source word features from popular and generic word embedding
collections. Regarding the third problem, a series of experiments involving convolutional
and max-pooling neural layers were conducted. Various patterns relating
text properties and network parameters with optimal classification accuracy were
observed. Combining convolutions of words, bigrams, and trigrams with regional
max-pooling layers in a couple of stacks produced the best results. The derived
architecture achieves competitive performance on sentiment polarity analysis of
movie, business and product reviews.
Given that labeled data are becoming the bottleneck of the current deep learning
systems, a future research direction could be the exploration of various data programming
possibilities for constructing even bigger labeled datasets. Investigation
of feature-level or decision-level ensemble techniques in the context of deep neural
networks could also be fruitful. Different feature types do usually represent complementary
characteristics of data. Combining word embedding and traditional text
features or utilizing recurrent networks on document splits and then aggregating the
predictions could further increase prediction accuracy of such models
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