Query parsing using probabilistic tree grammars

Abstract

The tree representation, using rhythm for defining the tree structure and pitch information for node labeling has proven to be effective in melodic similarity computation. In this paper we propose a solution representing melodies by tree grammars. For that, we infer a probabilistic context-free grammars for the melodies in a database, using their tree coding (with duration and pitch) and classify queries represented as a string of pitches. We aim to assess their ability to identify a noisy snippet query among a set of songs stored in symbolic format.