Towards cross-cultural study of folksong lyrics with machine translation

2026-10-04

AI Summary

This study addresses the long-standing challenge that language barriers pose to cross-cultural comparative research on folk song lyrics. For the first time, it integrates machine translation with neural topic models, employing natural language processing techniques to map folk song lyrics from five languages into a unified pivot language. This approach overcomes multilingual barriers, enabling global-scale analysis of associations between lyrical content and social functions. The findings reveal that translation quality for non-Indo-European languages requires further improvement, and while lyrical content is only partially correlated with social functions, underlying cross-cultural commonalities are discernible. Overall, this work provides an innovative methodological framework for computational folkloristics and cross-cultural text mining.

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.

Problem

• cross-cultural study
• folksong lyrics
• language barrier
• ethnomusicology
• social function

Innovation

• Machine Translation
• Natural Language Processing
• Neural Topic Model
• Cross-cultural Analysis
• Folksong Lyrics