Towards cross-cultural study of folksong lyrics with machine translation

Abstract

Music is universally present in human societies. Ethnomusicologists have long been documenting the diverse expressions of human musicality, and comparative musicology has recently brought several studies of folksong to a more global scale. Such cross-cultural research has not been conducted on lyrics: the language barrier has so far prevented work with multi-lingual data. However, Natural Language Processing (NLP) technologies have reached a stage where this language barrier may no longer be prohibitive. Combining folksong lyrics corpora across five languages, we machine-translate them to a pivot language with a pre-trained neural topic model, and we examine the relationship between content and social function within each language, and across languages for wedding songs. As expected, human evaluation of translation results shows that non-Indo-European languages suffer from overall worse translation quality. Experiments with topic models then indicate that the content of lyrics is at best partially related to the social function of folksongs across all languages. These experiments are just first steps into cross-cultural folk musics lyrics analysis; however, they do indicate that a previously unobserved web of cross-cultural relationships beyond ethnomusicological typologies may be uncovered through the study of what people sing across the world's diverse folk musics.