# K-pop Lyric Translation: Dataset, Analysis, and Neural-Modelling

arXiv: https://arxiv.org/abs/2309.11093 · HTML: https://mlsanity.com/paper/2309.11093/

## Key facts

- Cited by 4 papers in the map (data through 14 Oct 2026).
- Builds on 14 of its 56 references that are in the map.
- First posted on arXiv 20 Sep 2023.

## Builds on (most cited first, 14 of 14)

- [Attention Is All You Need](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1706.03762/) (2017)
- [BERT: Pre-training of Deep Bidirectional Transformers for Language Understanding](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1810.04805/) (2018)
- [Adam: A Method for Stochastic Optimization](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1412.6980/) (2014)
- [Sentence-BERT: Sentence Embeddings using Siamese BERT-Networks](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1908.10084/) (2019)
- [Sequence to Sequence Learning with Neural Networks](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1409.3215/) (2014)
- [MiniLM: Deep Self-Attention Distillation for Task-Agnostic Compression of Pre-Trained Transformers](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2002.10957/) (2020)
- [A Diversity-Promoting Objective Function for Neural Conversation Models](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1510.03055/) (2015)
- [A Contrastive Framework for Neural Text Generation](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2202.06417/) (2022)
- [Marian: Fast Neural Machine Translation in C++](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1804.00344/) (2018)
- [Machine Translation Decoding beyond Beam Search](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2104.05336/) (2021)
- [Automatic Song Translation for Tonal Languages](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2203.13420/) (2022)
- [Songs Across Borders: Singable and Controllable Neural Lyric Translation](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2305.16816/) (2023)
- [Translate the Beauty in Songs: Jointly Learning to Align Melody and Translate Lyrics](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2303.15705/) (2023)
- [A Computational Evaluation Framework for Singable Lyric Translation](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2308.13715/) (2023)

## Built on by (most cited first, 4 of 4)

- [Song Form-aware Full-Song Text-to-Lyrics Generation with Multi-Level Granularity Syllable Count Control](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2411.13100/) (2024)
- [LyCon: Lyrics Reconstruction from the Bag-of-Words Using Large Language Models](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2408.14750/) (2024)
- [MAVL: A Multilingual Audio-Video Lyrics Dataset for Animated Song Translation](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2505.18614/) (2025)
- [HAIM: Human-AI Music Datasets for AI Music Production Tracking Benchmark](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2606.01686/) (2026)

## Abstract (arXiv)

Lyric translation, a field studied for over a century, is now attracting computational linguistics researchers. We identified two limitations in previous studies. Firstly, lyric translation studies have predominantly focused on Western genres and languages, with no previous study centering on K-pop despite its popularity. Second, the field of lyric translation suffers from a lack of publicly available datasets; to the best of our knowledge, no such dataset exists. To broaden the scope of genres and languages in lyric translation studies, we introduce a novel singable lyric translation dataset, approximately 89% of which consists of K-pop song lyrics. This dataset aligns Korean and English lyrics line-by-line and section-by-section. We leveraged this dataset to unveil unique characteristics of K-pop lyric translation, distinguishing it from other extensively studied genres, and to construct a neural lyric translation model, thereby underscoring the importance of a dedicated dataset for singable lyric translations.