Exploring user-specific information in music retrieval

With the advancement of mobile computing technology and cloud-based streaming music service, user-centered music retrieval has become increasingly important. User-specific information has a fundamental impact on personal music preferences and interests. However, existing research pays little attention to the modeling and integration of user-specific information in music retrieval algorithms/models to facilitate music search. In this paper, we propose a novel model, named User-Information-Aware Music Interest Topic (UIAMIT) model. The model is able to effectively capture the influence of user-specific information on music preferences, and further associate users' music preferences and search terms under the same latent space. Based on this model, a user information aware retrieval system is developed, which can search and re-rank the results based on age-And/or gender-specific music preferences. A comprehensive experimental study demonstrates that our methods can significantly improve the search accuracy over existing text-based music retrieval methods.