MoodyLyrics: A Sentiment Annotated Lyrics Dataset

Music emotion recognition and recommendations today are changing the way people find and listen to their preferred musical tracks. Emotion recognition of songs is mostly based on feature extraction and learning from available datasets. In this work we take a different approach utilizing content words of lyrics and their valence and arousal norms in affect lexicons only. We use this method to annotate each song with one of the four emotion categories of Russell's model, and also to construct MoodyLyrics, a large dataset of lyrics that will be available for public use. For evaluation we utilized another lyrics dataset as ground truth and achieved an accuracy of 74.25 %. Our results confirm that valence is a better discriminator of mood than arousal. The results also prove that music mood recognition or annotation can be achieved with good accuracy even without subjective human feedback or user tags, when they are not available.