Automatic Detection of Moral Values in Music Lyrics

Understand

Moral values play a fundamental role in how we evaluate information, make decisions, and form judgements around important social issues.

• The possibility to extract morality rapidly from lyrics enables a deeper understanding of our music-listening behaviours.
• Building on the Moral Foundations Theory (MFT), we tasked a set of transformer-based language models (BERT) fine-tuned on 2,721 synthetic lyrics generated by a large language model (GPT-4) to detect moral values in 200 real music lyrics annotated by two experts.We evaluate their predictive capabilities against a series of baselines including out-of-domain (BERT fine-tuned on MFT-annotated social media texts) and zero-shot (GPT-4) classification.
• The proposed models yielded the best accuracy across experiments, with an average F1 weighted score of 0.8.