Audio-Based Auto-Tagging with Contextual Tags for Music

Music listening context such as location or activity has been shown to greatly influence the
users’ musical tastes. In this work, we study the relationship between user context and audio
content in order to enable context-aware music recommendation agnostic to user data.

For that, we propose a semi-automatic procedure to collect track sets which leverages playlist
titles as a proxy for context labelling. Using this, we create and release a dataset of approximately
50k tracks labelled with 15 different contexts.

Then, we present benchmark classification results on the created dataset using an audio auto-tagging
model. As the training and evaluation of these models are impacted by missing negative labels due to
incomplete annotations, we propose a sample-level weighted cross entropy loss to account for the
confidence in missing labels and show improved context prediction results.

Track Co-occurrences on contexts

This paper has been published in the proceedings of the 45th IEEE International Conference
on Acoustics, Speech and Signal Processing (ICASSP 2020).