MusiCLEF: a Benchmark Activity in Multimodal Music Information Retrieval

This work presents the rationale, tasks and procedures of a new benchmarking activity developed along with the Cross- Language Evaluation Forum (CLEF). Music is perhaps the least sensitive medium to language barriers, because listeners can enjoy music even if they do not share the same language, or even the same cultural background, of composers and performers. Yet, music search facilities in commercial systems are still based on simple keyword matching between music tags, with additional use of user profiling and collaborative filtering approaches. The goal of MusiCLEF is to promote the development of novel methodologies for music access and retrieval on real public music collections, which can combine content-based information, automatically extracted from music files, with contextual information, provided by users through tags, comments, or reviews.