A Multimodal Approach to Language Identification in Sotho-Tswana Musical Videos

Language plays a crucial role in Sotho-Tswana musical videos, as it helps determine the sentiment and genre. The Sotho-Tswana languages, spoken in parts of Southern Africa, are used to compose many indigenous songs and music. However, speakers of one of the Sotho-Tswana languages may not understand other Sotho-Tswana languages. Given the widespread availability of these musical videos on social media platforms, there is a need for appropriate recommendations for users based on the language used in the videos. While traditional language identification in music has focused on audio, music information for identifying the singing language can also be embedded in other modalities, such as visual and text. This study employs a multimodal approach to identify the singing language in Sotho-Tswana musical videos. The multimodal approach focuses on three modalities, visual, audio, and textual/lyrics. A multimodal dataset of Sotho-Tswana musical videos is used to train deep learning and language models, for each of the modalities. After the independent training, for each of the modalities, a decision-level (late) fusion method is used to combine the results of the training from the three modalities. The results demonstrate that a multimodal approach outperforms single-modality methods, such as those relying solely on lyrics or textual information.