Personalized music search based on graph embedding

Due to the rise of music streaming platforms, huge collections of music are now available to users on various devices. Within these collections, users aim to find and explore songs based on certain criteria reflecting their current and context-specific preferences. Currently, users are limited to either using search facilities or relying on recommender systems that suggest suitable tracks or artists. Using search facilities requires the user to have some idea about the targeted music and to formulate a query that accurately describes this music, whereas recommender systems are traditionally geared towards long-term shifts of user preferences in contrast to  ad-hoc and interactive preference elicitation. To bridge this gap, we propose geMsearch, an approach for personalized, explorative music search based on graph embedding techniques. As the ecosystem of a music collection can be represented as a heterogeneous graph containing nodes describing e.g., tracks, artists, genres or users, we employ graph embedding techniques to learn low-dimensional vector representations for all nodes within the graph. This allows for efficient approximate querying of the collection and, more importantly, for employing visualization strategies that allow the user to explore the music collection in a 3D-space. Based on a dataset with over 1,5m graph nodes, we show that the performance of our recommendations is comparable to standard matrix factorization techniques and that query-based results can be created.