Recommending Appropriate Lyrics to Youngsters
Understanding the Presence of Inappropriate Content in Music Lyrics: Insights for Children's Recommender Systems
J. Heijne (TU Delft - Electrical Engineering, Mathematics and Computer Science)
Maria Soledad Pera – Mentor (TU Delft - Web Information Systems)
R. Ungruh – Mentor (TU Delft - Web Information Systems)
J. Urbano – Graduation committee member (TU Delft - Multimedia Computing)
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Abstract
Recommender systems play a considerable role in the consumption of music, also for children. Children are easily influenced, inappropriate song lyrics can negatively impact children's behaviour and personality, by teaching inappropriate language or harmful biases. We argue for a need for recommenders to protect children from inappropriate content. Recommender systems should consider what content is and is not well-suited for children. To guide future design and development of recommender systems for children, this research probes the music lyrics of Pop, Rock, Country, Rap, and R&B for inappropriate content. We achieve this by an empirical analysis using four existing algorithms to scan different facets of inappropriate content in the lyrics in a dataset of 37,993 songs from the Genius database. The outcome of this empirical exploration reveals that Rap and R&B are the most inappropriate music genres and advises to be cautious when recommending these genres to children. Results also show that inappropriate content is highly prevalent in music. We address the need for a filter for recommender systems, to filter inappropriate songs for children.