The music genre perception expressed through human annotations of artists or albums varies significantly across language-bound cultures. These variations cannot be modeled as mere translations since we also need to account for cultural differences in the music genre perception.

In this work, we study the feasibility of obtaining relevant cross-lingual, culture-specific music genre annotations based only on language-specific semantic representations, namely distributed concept embeddings and ontologies. Our study, focused on six languages, shows that unsupervised cross-lingual music genre annotation is feasible with high accuracy, especially when combining both types of representations. This approach of studying music genres is the most extensive to date and has many implications in musicology and music information retrieval. Besides, we introduce a new, domain-dependent cross-lingual corpus to benchmark state of the art multilingual pre-trained embedding models.

This paper will be published in the proceedings of the 2020 Conference on Empirical Methods in Natural Language Processing (EMNLP 2020).