Improving automatic music tag annotation using stacked generalization of probabilistic SVM outputs

Music listeners frequently use words to describe music. Personalized music recommendation systems such as Last.fm and Pandora rely on manual annotations (tags) as a mechanism for querying and navigating large music collections. A well-known issue in such recommendation systems is known as the cold-start problem: it is not possible to recommend new songs/tracks until those songs/tracks have been manually annotated. Automatic tag annotation based on content analysis is a potential solution to this problem and has recently been gaining attention. We describe how stacked generalization can be used to improve the performance of a state-of-the-art automatic tag annotation system for music based on audio content analysis and report results on two publicly available datasets.