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

Get to Know Fi Keane, MSLIS Student

MSLIS student Fi Keane found their way to the iSchool after working in the children’s section of a bookstore. For the past academic year, they have served as the graduate assistant for Research on Diversity in Youth Literature, a peer-reviewed, open access, academic journal hosted by the iSchool’s Center for Children’s Books.

Fi Keane

Kaushik defends dissertation

Doctoral candidate Smirity Kaushik successfully defended her dissertation, "Digital Trust, Safety, and Privacy in the Age of Emerging Technologies," on June 16. 

Smirity Kaushik

New book explores how AI is reshaping cultural heritage

Glen Layne-Worthey, associate director for research support services for the HathiTrust Research Center (HTRC), and J. Stephen Downie, professor and HTRC co-director, have edited a new book, Navigating Artificial Intelligence for Cultural Heritage Organisations, which was recently released by UCL Press. 

Han defends dissertation

Doctoral candidate Yingying Han successfully defended her dissertation, "Community Archives as Agency: Documenting Chinese American Experiences in the U.S.,” on May 28.

Yingying Han

Student award recipients announced

The School of Information Sciences recognized student award recipients at the iSchool Convocation on May 18. Awards are based on academic achievements as well as attributes that contribute to professional success. For more information about each award, including past recipients, visit the Student Awards page. Congratulations to this year's honorees!

Award recipients Mahir Thakkar, Delia Kerr-Dennhardt, Katie Skoufes, Audrey Bentch, and Adam Beaty.