Emotion-Based Music Recommendation from Quality Annotations and Large-Scale User-Generated Tags

Emotions constitute an important aspect when listening to music. While manual annotations from user studies grounded in psychological research on music and emotions provide a well-defined and fine-grained description of the emotions evoked when listening to a music track, user-generated tags provide an alternative view stemming from large-scale data. In this work, we examine the relationship between these two emotional characterizations of music and analyze their impact on the performance of emotion-based music recommender systems individually and jointly. Our analysis shows that (i) the agreement between the two characterizations, as measured with Cohen’s κ coefficient and Kendall rank correlation, is often low, (ii) Leveraging the emotion profile based on the intensity of evoked emotions from high-quality annotations leads to performances that are stable across different recommendation algorithms; (iii) Simultaneously leveraging the emotion profiles based on high-quality and large-scale annotations allows to provide recommendations that are less exposed to the low accuracy that algorithms might reach when leveraging one type of data, only.