Hindi podcast genre prediction using support vector classifier

India experienced a 23% rise in podcast listening after the Covid-19 pandemic. The pandemic and screen fatigue led people to seek their favourite old audio podcasts. Podcast genre classification allows listeners to compile a playlist of their favourite tracks; it also helps podcast streaming services provide recommendations to users based on the genre of the podcasts they enjoy. Since the COVID-19 pandemic, the need for educational content in all forms, including podcasts, has skyrocketed, making it even more crucial to anticipate the genre of educational podcasts. Educational podcasts are a sub-genre of the broader education genre and typically involve audio recordings of discussions, lectures, or interviews on educational topics. Education podcast genre prediction is required to efficiently classify and arrange educational content and make it simpler for listeners to access and absorb pertinent information. This study focuses on Podcast Genre Prediction, specifically for the Hindi language. In this study, our developed PodGen dataset was used, which consists of 550 five-minute podcasts with 26,867 sentences, where every podcast was manually annotated into one of the four genre categories (Horror, Motivational, Crime, and Romance). The performance comparison of state-of-the-art machine learning techniques on the PodGen dataset was used to demonstrate accuracy. The best performance on testing data was observed in the Support Vector Classifier model with balanced accuracy: 82.42%, precision (weighted): 83.09%, recall (weighted): 82.42%, and F1 score (weighted): 82.39%.

Automated summary

India saw a 23% increase in podcast listening during the Covid-19 pandemic. People turned to their favorite old audio podcasts due to the pandemic and screen fatigue. The classification of podcast genres helps listeners create playlists and enables podcast streaming services to recommend relevant content based on the genres users enjoy.