We propose a novel study on authorship attribution for Chinese lyrics, a domain where clean, public datasets are sorely lacking. Our contributions are twofold: (1) we create a new, balanced dataset of Chinese lyrics spanning multiple genres, and (2) we develop and fine-tune a domain-specific model, comparing its performance against zero-shot inference using the DeepSeek LLM. We test two central hypotheses. First, we hypothesize that a fine-tuned model will outperform a zero-shot LLM baseline. Second, we hypothesize that performance is genre-dependent. Our experiments strongly confirm Hypothesis 2: structured genres (e.g. Folklore & Tradition) yield significantly higher attribution accuracy than more abstract genres (e.g. Love & Romance). Hypothesis 1 receives only partial support: fine-tuning improves robustness and generalization in Test1 (real-world data and difficult genres), but offers limited or ambiguous gains in Test2, a smaller, synthetically-augmented set. We show that the design limitations of Test2 (e.g., label imbalance, shallow lexical differences, and narrow genre sampling) can obscure the true effectiveness of fine-tuning. Our work establishes the first benchmark for cross-genre Chinese lyric attribution, highlights the importance of genre-sensitive evaluation, and provides a public dataset and analytical framework for future research. We conclude with recommendations: enlarge and diversify test sets, reduce reliance on token-level data augmentation, balance author representation across genres, and investigate domain-adaptive pretraining as a pathway for improved attribution performance.

Although lyrics represent an essential component of music, few music information processing studies have been conducted on the characteristics of lyricists. Because these characteristics may be valuable for musical applications, such as recommendations, they warrant further study. We considered a potential method that extracts features representing the characteristics of lyricists from lyrics. Because these features must be identified prior to extraction, we focused on lyricists with easily identifiable features. We believe that it is desirable for singers to perform unique songs that share certain characteristics specific to the singer. Accordingly, we hypothesized that lyricists account for the unique characteristics of the singers they write lyrics for. In other words, lyric-lyricist classification performance or the ease of capturing the features of a lyricist from the lyrics may depend on the variety of singers. In this study, we observed a relationship between lyricist-singer entropy or the variety of singers associated with a single lyricist and lyric-lyricist classification performance. As an example, the lyricist-singer entropy is minimal when the lyricist writes lyrics for only one singer. In our experiments, we grouped lyricists among five groups in terms of lyricist-singer entropy and assessed the lyric-lyricist classification performance within each group. Consequently, the best F1 score was obtained for the group with the lowest lyricist-singer entropy. Our results suggest that further analyses of the features contributing to lyric-lyricist classification performance on the lowest lyricist-singer entropy group may improve the feature extraction task for lyricists.

To call the film above surreal would be a dramatic understatement. Watching it for the first time, I almost couldn't believe what I was seeing -- actors taking something without any objective meaning, and breathing semantic life into it with their emotion, inflection, and movement. After further consideration, I realized that actors do this all the time. Take any obscure line of Shakespearean dialogue and consider that 99.5% of the audience who hears that line in 2016 would not understand its meaning if they read it in on paper. However, in a play, they do understand it based on its context and the actor's delivery.