@inproceedings{chen-etal-2025-tuning,
    title = "Tuning Into Bias: A Computational Study of Gender Bias in Song Lyrics",
    author = "Chen, Danqing  and
      Satish, Adithi  and
      Khanbayov, Rasul  and
      Schuster, Carolin  and
      Groh, Georg",
    editor = "Kazantseva, Anna  and
      Szpakowicz, Stan  and
      Degaetano-Ortlieb, Stefania  and
      Bizzoni, Yuri  and
      Pagel, Janis",
    booktitle = "Proceedings of the 9th Joint SIGHUM Workshop on Computational Linguistics for Cultural Heritage, Social Sciences, Humanities and Literature (LaTeCH-CLfL 2025)",
    month = may,
    year = "2025",
    address = "Albuquerque, New Mexico",
    publisher = "Association for Computational Linguistics",
    url = "https://preview.aclanthology.org/landing_page/2025.latechclfl-1.12/",
    pages = "117--129",
    ISBN = "979-8-89176-241-1",
    abstract = "The application of text mining methods is becoming increasingly prevalent, particularly within Humanities and Computational Social Sciences, as well as in a broader range of disciplines. This paper presents an analysis of gender bias in English song lyrics using topic modeling and bias measurement techniques. Leveraging BERTopic, we cluster a dataset of 537,553 English songs into distinct topics and analyze their temporal evolution. Our results reveal a significant thematic shift in song lyrics over time, transitioning from romantic themes to a heightened focus on the sexualization of women. Additionally, we observe a substantial prevalence of profanity and misogynistic content across various topics, with a particularly high concentration in the largest thematic cluster. To further analyse gender bias across topics and genres in a quantitative way, we employ the Single Category Word Embedding Association Test (SC-WEAT) to calculate bias scores for word embeddings trained on the most prominent topics as well as individual genres. The results indicate a consistent male bias in words associated with intelligence and strength, while appearance and weakness words show a female bias. Further analysis highlights variations in these biases across topics, illustrating the interplay between thematic content and gender stereotypes in song lyrics."
}