Podcast data modeling

This repository contains a podcast dataset and an implementation of the Adversarial Learning-based Podcast Representation (ALPR) introduced in the following paper:

Longqi Yang, Yu Wang, Drew Dunne, Michael Sobolev, Mor Naaman and Deborah Estrin. 2018. More than Just Words: Modeling Non-textual Characteristics of Podcasts. In Proceedings of WSDM’19.

A pretrained model is also included. Please direct any questions to Longqi Yang.

If you use this data or algorithm, please cite:

@inproceedings{yang2019podcast,
  title={More than Just Words: Modeling Non-textual Characteristics of Podcasts},
  author={Yang, Longqi and Wang, Yu and Dunne, Drew and Sobolev, Michael and Naaman, Mor and Estrin, Deborah},
  booktitle={Proceedings of the Twelfth ACM International Conference on Web Search and Data Mining},
  year={2019},
  organization={ACM}
}

Code descriptions

• Converting a WAV audio into a Mel-Spectrogram: wav_to_spectrogram.py.
• Training ALPR: alpr.py (The files variable needs to be specified - it should contain a list of spectrogram files).
• Extracting ALPR using a pretrained model: alpr_extractor.py.
• Reproducing experimental results: energy_prediction.ipynb.

Data descriptions

Raw podcast audio URLs

• Set (used for ALPR training and attributes prediction): audio_links/podcast_episodes_sa.txt.
• Set (used for popularity prediction): audio_links/podcast_episodes_sb.txt.

Each line of these files contains an podcast episode represented by a JSON object with the following fields:

{
    "url": the URL to download the raw audio,
    "itunes_channel_id": the iTunes channel that the episode belongs to,
    "id": a unique epsiode ID,
    "title": the title of the episode
}

Prediction labels

• Energy prediction:
  • Training data: attributes_labels/energy_train.txt.
  • Testing data: attributes_labels/energy_test.txt.
  • Format: each line contains a snippet (~12s) represented by a JSON object:

  {
      "label": 1 denotes energetic and 0 denotes calm,
      "id": the episode ID,
      "offset": the temporal position of the snippet (starting timestamp=12*offset seconds)
  }
  

• Seriousness prediction:
  • Training data: attributes_labels/seriousness_train.txt.
  • Testing data: attributes_labels/seriousness_test.txt.
  • Format: follows the energy prediction task except for the labels --- 1 denotes serious and 0 denotes humorous.
• Popularity prediction:
  • Training data: popularity_labels/popularity_train.txt.
  • Testing data: popularity_labels/popularity_test.txt.
  • Format: each line contains an episode represented by a JSON object:

  {
      "label": 1 denotes popular and 0 denotes long tail,
      "id": the episode ID,
      "length": the number of leading audio snippets used for the prediction (each snippet is 12s in length)
  }
  

Prediction features and raw audio (caveats: files are large)

• Energy and seriousness predictions:
  • Spectrograms:
    • Download using the script download_spectrograms_attributes.sh.
    • Spectrograms are stored in the .npy (numpy array) format and are named following the rule:

    data/attributes_prediction_spectrograms/e_[episode id]_[offset].npy
    

  • Raw audio:
    • Download using the script download_audio_attributes.sh.
    • Audio is stored in the .wav format and is named following the rule:

    data/attributes_prediction_raw_audio/e_[episode id]_[offset].wav
    

• Popularity prediction:

  • Spectrograms:

    • Download using the script download_spectrograms_popularity.sh.
    • Spectrograms are stored in the .npy (numpy array) format and are named following the rule:

    data/popularity_prediction_spectrograms/e_[episode id]_[0 -- length-1].npy
    

  • Transcriptions:

    • Download using the script download_transcriptions_popularity.sh.
    • Transcriptions are stored in the .txt format and are named following the rule:

    data/popularity_prediction_transcriptions/e_[episode id].txt
    

    • A transcription file lists transcribed words with the following format (a word per line):

    a spoken word \t starting time (ms) \t end time (ms)

  • Raw audio:

    • Download using the script download_audio_popularity.sh.
    • Audio is stored in the .wav format and is named following the rule:

    data/popularity_prediction_raw_audio/e_[episode id]_[0 -- length-1].wav
    

Reproducing experimental results using the pretrained model

• Download pretrained ALPR using the script download_pretrained_model.sh.
• Load the pretrained model and extract ALPR features as follows:

from alpr_extractor import ALPRExtractor

extractor = ALPRExtractor()
extractor.load_model(path='pretrained_model/alpr')
features = extractor.forward((spectrograms + 2) / 2)

• An example notebook to reproduce experimental results: energy_prediction.ipynb.