Tamil lyrics corpus: Analysis and Experiments Dhivya Chinnappa Praveenraj Dhandapani Thomson Reuters Intellect Design Arena Ltd. [email protected] [email protected] Abstract ernment buildings in Tamil Nadu, India. Polit- ical leaders, orators and even common people In this paper, we present a new Tamil quote Thirukkural excerpts in their daily lives. lyrics corpus extracted from Tamil movies Since the inception of the Tamil movie captured across a range of 65 years (1954 industry in the early 1930s, Tamil literary to 2019). We present a detailed corpus analysis showing the nature of Tamil lyrics works have taken a different form. From the with respect to lyricists and the year which very beginning, Tamil movies used the plat- it was written. We also present similar- form to showcase the language’s rich litera- ity score across different lyricists based ture through movie dialogues and song lyrics. on their song lyrics. We present experi- Tamil literary works as old as Sangam litera- mental results based on the SOTA BERT ture have been depicted in early movies, and Tamil models to identify the lyricists of a the recent movies showcase a mix of old and song. Finally, we present future research directions encouraging researchers to pur- contemporary literary works. Thus, Tamil sue Tamil NLP research. movies have become an inseparable part of most Tamilians’ lives. While independent lit- 1 Introduction erary works (poems, hykoos, novels, etc.) ex- ist, Tamil movies consistently act as impor- Tamil is a classical Dravidian language spoken tant medium in showcasing rich Tamil literary in the states Tamil Nadu and Pondicherry, In- works. dia. It is also widely spoken in Srilanka and The ideologies portrayed in Tamil movies is one of the official languages of the country. closely reflect Tamilians’ lifestyles. Tamil There are considerable Tamil speaking people movies and Tamil politics go hand in hand in countries like Singapore, Malaysia, Canada, (Kalorth, 2021). There are several people in and Mauritius. the Tamil movie industry with strong political Historians note that Tamil is as old as 2600 opinions, and it is not uncommon for Tamil years. The earliest identified Tamil literature movie dialogues and Tamil songs to reflect known as the Sangam literature dates back their political ideologies. to 600 B.C. (Abraham, 2003). Tamilians as The Tamil movie industry releases a movie an ethnic group appreciate literary works and every four days (Krishnan and Sakkthivel, refer to literary excerpts in their daily lives. 2010). That is, on average there are 90 movies 1 For example, Thirukkural , one of the popu- released every year. Similar to other Indian lar literary works, also called the Ulaga Pothu language movies, Tamil movies include several Marai (translation: Universal book of princi- songs. Each song in a Tamil movie is written ples) includes short literary phrases emphasiz- by a lyricist coordinating with the movie di- ing on principles for a prosperous life. Schools rector and the music director. The movie di- teach Thirukkural to their students as early rector usually describes the situation and the as kindergarten. Thirukkural excerpts are of- emotion where the song is supposed to fit in. ten found in public transportations and gov- Depending on the given situation by the movie 1https://thirukkural133.wordpress.com/ director, the lyricist writes the song lyrics, and contents/ the music director composes the music for the 1 Proceedings of the First Workshop on Speech and Language Technologies for Dravidian Languages, pages 1–9 April 20, 2021 ©2021 Association for Computational Linguistics song. Though the lyrics of a Tamil movie song Thamizhan5 from the movie Mersal describes can stand alone, they are usually an integral the beauty of the language Tamil and glorifies part of the movie enhancing an emotion. Tamilians life styles. In this paper, we introduce a new Tamil Recently with the advent of youtube, there lyrics corpus2. Specifically, we focus only on are several songs that get popular even before Tamil movie lyrics and not Tamil lyrics by in- the movie release. While releasing songs be- dependent lyricists. The main contributions fore releasing a movie has been a practice in of this paper are (a) a corpus including Tamil the Tamil movie industry for a while, youtube song lyrics, lyricists, and other details; (b) has taken these songs sooner to the audience a detailed corpus analysis focusing on Tamil than ever before. Until recently, all movie lyrics; (c) experimental results to identify the songs were released together in a Compact lyricist of a given song lyric; and (d) future Disk, cassette tape or an online streaming site. research directions about how to utilize the However, in the past few years Tamil movies Tamil lyrics dataset. have started releasing singles from movies. These songs typically include a catchy lyric, 2 Background music or dance moves. They act as a promo- tion for the movie and usually have millions of Songs are an integral part of Tamil movies. views before the movie release. Kutty story6 They represent, enhance, and complement an from the movie Master and Bujji7 from the emotion in the movie. We explain the role of movie Jagamae thanthiram fall under this cat- these songs and exemplify with some recent egory. Interestingly, the song Kutty story has Tamil movie songs. large amount of English songs, which is a phe- One of the most common emotion expressed nomena observed in many recent Tamil songs. in Tamil songs is romance. This includes We present youtube links in the footnote falling in love, breakup, marriage, etc. For to each song exemplified in this section. The example, the song Nenjukul peidhidum3 from English translation of the song lyrics can be the movie Vaaranam Aayiram describes a sit- viewed by turning on the subtitles in the uation when a man meets a woman for the youtube video. first time. This song emphasizes the emotion How are Tamil song lyrics written? In of love at first sight. The visualization and most cases, the movie director comes up with the lyrics are dramatic, and do not depict the a situation in the movie.. The music director actual story of the movie. While the flow of composes a tune capturing the emotion of this the movie is not affected by the song, it plays situation. The lyricist writes the lyrics, given a vital role in emphasizing a man’s emotion the tune. However, there are few music direc- towards a woman the first time he sees her. tors who compose tune to a given lyric. Some Tamil movie songs are created to complement the scenes in the movie. The 3 Related work movie would not be complete without the song. These songs include sequential scenes from the There exists a Tamil lyrics dataset (Subrama- movie. For instance, the song Kadhaipoma4 nian, 2020) in Kaggle for Tamil lyrics. The from the movie Oh my kadavulae describes the dataset includes the lyrics of Tamil songs, emotion of taking someone for granted while alongside song name and movie name. How- aptly fitting in the movie scenes. ever, we could not track any further experi- There are several Tamil movie songs writ- ments or research related to this dataset. It ten with political and social intentions. Tamil does not include the name of the lyricist or actors with political ideologies often hint their other details. Unlike this dataset, our corpus political intentions in their songs. Recently, includes the name of the lyricist, the name of there are several songs released emphasiz- the music director, and the year the song was ing on social equity. The song Aalaporan released. We also include the English translit- 2https://github.com/praveenraj0904/tamillyricscorpus 5Aalaporan Thamizhan 3Nenjukul peithidum 6Kutty Story 4Kadhaipoma 7Bujji 2 erated song lyrics. We believe these informa- Statistics tion would be useful to researchers. Songs 5,449 There are some prominent Tamil NLP works Lyricists 324 associated with Tamil lyrics. Sundara Kan- Music directors 151 chana and Ganapathy (2017) work with 1, 000 Movies 1,147 Tamil songs to identify three aspects for a Words 1,309,425 given Tamil song lyric. The three aspects are Unique words 129,614 base, mood, and style. The base aspect in- Years range 1954-2019 cludes the types character, festival, nature, Maximum words/song 653 relationship, romance, occasion, spiritual, pa- Minimum words/song 17 triotic and misc. The emotion aspect includes Average words/song 188 the types happy, sad, excited, tender, scared Table 1: Statistics of the Tamil lyrics dataset and angry. The styles aspect includes tradi- tional, folk, contemporary and mixed. Their work is word based, and they use TF-IDF as and tune; and (ii) context text and images. In a feature in their classifier to predict these as- their next work (Sridhar et al., 2016) they fol- pects. low a neuro-linguistic approach for lyric gen- Ramakrishnan A et al. (2009) work on auto- eration intending to add dialect, image, and matically generating Tamil lyrics for melodies. author specific features. In their recent work They approach the problem as a sequence la- (Sridhar et al., 2018) they generate lyrics, com- beling problem targeting to guess the syllabic bining their two previous works. They make pattern. Then they forward this pattern to a use of visual images, derived tune, and other sentence generation module, where they use specification such as the dialect of the speaker. Dijkstra’s algorithm to choose a meaningful Unlike the works described, our work tries to phrase. In their latter work Ramakrishnan A capture the characteristics of the lyric and the and Lalitha Devi (2010), follow a mapping lyricist. In an analysis perspective, our work is scheme for matching melody with words.