Are Theme Songs Usable for Anime Retrieval?

Japanese anime is well known as a multimedia-related popular culture but its retrieval techniques have not been fully developed. In this paper, we made an attempt of similarity-based retrieval of anime works using their theme songs. We hypothesized that similar anime works have similar theme songs because the atmosphere of anime works may be reflected in their theme songs. Under this hypothesis, we measured the audio-based and lyrics-based similarity among theme songs to search for anime works similar to a given query work. Experimental results show that the anime retrieval with audio-based and lyrics-based theme song similarity succeeded with average accuracy of 63% and 66%, respectively. This accuracy is higher than random selection, even though it is lower than an upper-bound accuracy based on manually prepared summary texts.