Robust and Fast Two-Pass Search Method for Lyric Search Covering Erroneous Queries Due to Mishearing

Abstract

This paper proposes a robust and fast lyric search method for music information retrieval (MIR). The effectiveness of lyric search systems based on full-text retrieval engines or web search engines is highly compromised when the queries of lyric phrases contain incorrect parts due to mishearing. Though several previous studies proposed phonetic pattern matching techniques to identify the songs that the misheard lyric phrases refer to, a real-time search algorithm has yet to be realized. This paper proposes a fast phonetic string matching method using a two-pass search algorithm. It consists of pre-selecting the probable candidates by a rapid index-based search in the first pass and executing a dynamic-programming-based search process with an adaptive termination strategy in the second pass. Experimental results show that the proposed search method reduces processing time by more than 87% compared with the conventional methods, without loss of search accuracy.