A method for extracting semantic information from on-line art music discussion forums

In this paper a method for extracting semantic informationfrom online music discussion forums is proposed. The semantic relations are inferred from the co-occurrence of musical concepts in forum posts, using network analysis. The method starts by defining a dictionary of common music terms in an art music tradition. Then, it creates a complex network representation of the online forum by matchingsuch dictionary against the forum posts. Once the complex network is built we can study different network measures, including node relevance, node co-occurrence andterm relations via semantically connecting words. Moreover, we can detect communities of concepts inside the forum posts. The rationale is that some music terms are more related to each other than to other terms. All in all, this methodology allows us to obtain meaningful and relevantinformation from forum discussions.

Comunicació presentada al 2nd CompMusic Workshop, celebrat els dies 12 i 13 de juliol de 2012 a Istanbul (Turquia), organitzat per CompMusic.

This research was partly funded by the European Research Council under the European Union’s Seventh Framework Program, as part of the CompMusic project (ERC grant agreement 267583). Joan Serr`a acknowledges 2009-SGR-1434 from Generalitat de Catalunya and JAEDOC069/2010 from Consejo Superior de InvestigacionesCientíficas.