The proliferation of music streaming platforms has created an urgent need for automatic explicit content detection to protect vulnerable audiences, particularly children, from inappropriate material. This study presents a comprehensive comparative analysis of machine learning approaches for classifying explicit content in song lyrics using a dataset of 108,138 songs from Spotify. We evaluate traditional machine learning models (Decision Tree, Logistic Regression, Naive Bayes, SVM) with two distinct text representation methods: TF-IDF vectorization and pre-trained LyricsBERT embeddings. Additionally, we assess the impact of incorporating musical metadata and acoustic features alongside textual data. Our experimental framework compares feature combinations ranging from lyrics-only to comprehensive multi-modal representations, including one that excludes lyrical data entirely. Results demonstrate that traditional models with TF-IDF vectorization achieve competitive performance, with Decision Tree achieving the highest F1-score of 0.7896 when combining textual, numerical, and categorical features. Surprisingly, metadata-only approaches using Logistic Regression achieved superior performance (F1-score: 0.8715), suggesting that acoustic and categorical features may be more reliable indicators of explicit content than lyrics alone. Deep learning approaches using BERT fine-tuning achieved lower performance (F1-score: 0.7046) at a significantly higher computational cost. These findings challenge the assumption that lyrical content is the primary determinant of explicitness, providing practical insights for developing scalable content moderation systems on streaming platforms.

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Detecting Explicit Content in Spotify Song Lyrics Using Natural Language Processing Techniques

  • Aaron C. A. Navarro Mendoza,
  • Dylan J. Huarcaya Farfan,
  • Fernando A. Usurin Arias,
  • Marcelino Maita-Vargas,
  • Ariana M. Villegas Suarez

摘要

The proliferation of music streaming platforms has created an urgent need for automatic explicit content detection to protect vulnerable audiences, particularly children, from inappropriate material. This study presents a comprehensive comparative analysis of machine learning approaches for classifying explicit content in song lyrics using a dataset of 108,138 songs from Spotify. We evaluate traditional machine learning models (Decision Tree, Logistic Regression, Naive Bayes, SVM) with two distinct text representation methods: TF-IDF vectorization and pre-trained LyricsBERT embeddings. Additionally, we assess the impact of incorporating musical metadata and acoustic features alongside textual data. Our experimental framework compares feature combinations ranging from lyrics-only to comprehensive multi-modal representations, including one that excludes lyrical data entirely. Results demonstrate that traditional models with TF-IDF vectorization achieve competitive performance, with Decision Tree achieving the highest F1-score of 0.7896 when combining textual, numerical, and categorical features. Surprisingly, metadata-only approaches using Logistic Regression achieved superior performance (F1-score: 0.8715), suggesting that acoustic and categorical features may be more reliable indicators of explicit content than lyrics alone. Deep learning approaches using BERT fine-tuning achieved lower performance (F1-score: 0.7046) at a significantly higher computational cost. These findings challenge the assumption that lyrical content is the primary determinant of explicitness, providing practical insights for developing scalable content moderation systems on streaming platforms.