Kahyun Choi defends dissertation

Doctoral candidate Kahyun Choi successfully defended her dissertation, "Computational Lyricology: Quantitative Approaches to Understanding Song Lyrics and Their Interpretations."

Her committee included Professor J. Stephen Downie (chair); Professor Michael Twidale; Professor Ted Underwood; and Sally Jo Cunningham, associate professor of computer science at The University of Waikato.

From the abstract – This dissertation research investigates song lyric complexity and how it might be measured computationally. The research proposes two different lyric complexity scores: one based on song lyrics that aims to capture concreteness of song lyrics, one of quantitative dimensions of text complexity, and the other based on user-generated interpretations of song lyrics that aims to capture some qualitative dimensions of text complexity. This work revealed that (1) concreteness of popular song lyrics fell from the middle of the 1960s until the 1990s and rose after that-the advent of Hip-Hop/Rap and the number of words in song lyrics are highly correlated with the rise in concreteness after the early 1990s; (2) interpretations are a good input source for automatic topic detection algorithms because they are more useful than song lyrics as input for an automatic song lyrics topic classification task across various feature representations; and 3) the interpretation-based lyric complexity metric looks promising because (a) it may capture the inverted-U relationship between music complexity and preference, and (b) it may also capture the theory that lexically difficult song lyrics could lead to more diverse interpretations.

Updated on
Backto the news archive

Related News

Scholarship alleviates financial burden for returning student

During her time as an active-duty Naval Officer, Anna Hartman realized that she had a passion for helping others and building community. That passion, combined with a lifelong love of reading, led her to pursue an MSLIS degree at the University of Illinois. Hartman is receiving support for her studies through the Balz Endowment Fund, which was established by Nancy (BA LAS '70, MSLIS '72) and Dan (BS Media '68, MS Media '72) Balz to help make education more affordable for returning students.

Anna Hartman

Ocepek and Sanfilippo co-edit book on misinformation

Assistant Professor Melissa Ocepek and Assistant Professor Madelyn Rose Sanfilippo have co-edited a new book, Governing Misinformation in Everyday Knowledge Commons, which was recently published by Cambridge University Press. An open access edition of the book is available, thanks to support from the Governing Knowledge Commons Research Coordination Network (NSF 2017495). The new book explores the socio-technical realities of misinformation in a variety of online and offline everyday environments. 

Governing Misinformation in Everyday Knowledge Commons book

Faculty receive support for AI-related projects from new pilot program

Associate Professor Yun Huang, Assistant Professor Jiaqi Ma, and Assistant Professor Haohan Wang have received computing resources from the National Artificial Intelligence Research Resource (NAIRR), a two-year pilot program led by the National Science Foundation in partnership with other federal agencies and nongovernmental partners. The goal of the pilot is to support AI-related research with particular emphasis on societal challenges. Last month, awardees presented their research at the NAIRR Pilot Annual Meeting.

Winning exhibits highlight evolution of music media and Uni High magazine

MSLIS students Monica Gil, Holly Bleeden, and Harrison Price were selected as winners of this year's Graduate Student Exhibit Contest, sponsored by the University of Illinois Library. Gil and Bleeden won first place for their exhibit, "Echoes of Time: The Evolution of Music Media," and Price won second place for his exhibit, "Unique-ly Illinois: Creative Writing from High School to Higher Education." The exhibits will be on display in the Marshall Gallery in the library through the end of March.

MSLIS students Monica Gil and Holly Bleeden standing next to their exhibit, "Echoes of Time: The Evolution of Music Media," at the Main Library.

Wei receives Amazon Post Internship Fellowship

PhD student Tianxin Wei has been awarded an Amazon Post Internship Fellowship, which will provide $20,000 in unrestricted funds and $20,000 in Amazon Web Services (AWS) credits to support Wei's research with his advisor, Professor Jingrui He. For the past two summers, Wei has served as an applied scientist intern at Amazon in Palo Alto, California. He has been part of a team that is working on search query understanding within Amazon apps and services, as well as developing shopping foundation models.

Tianxin Wei