LyricLure: Mining Catchy Hooks in Song Lyrics to Enhance Music Discovery and Recommendation

Music Search encounters a significant challenge as users increasingly rely on catchy lines from lyrics to search for both new releases and other popular songs. Integrating lyrics into existing lexical search index or using lyrics vector index pose difficulties due to lyrics text length. While lexical scoring mechanisms like BM25 are inadequate and necessitates complex query planning and index schema for long text, text embedding similarity based techniques often retrieve noisy near-similar meaning lyrics, resulting in low precision. This paper introduces a proactive approach to extract catchy phrases from song lyrics, overcoming the limitations of conventional graph-based phrase extractors and deep learning models, which are primarily designed for extractive summarization or task-specific key phrase extraction from domain-specific corpora. Additionally, we employ a multi-step mechanism to mine search query logs for potential unresolved user queries containing catchy phrases from lyrics. This involves creation of word and character k-gram index for lyric chunks, careful query and lyrics domain-centric normalization (and expansion) and a re-ranking layer incorporating lexical and well as semantic similarity. Together these strategies helped us create a high retrieval source specifically for serving lyrics intent queries with high recall.