  In order to satisfy processing time constraints, many MIR tasks process only
a segment of the whole music signal. This practice may lead to decreasing
performance, since the most important information for the tasks may not be in
those processed segments. In this paper, we leverage generic summarization
algorithms, previously applied to text and speech summarization, to summarize
items in music datasets. These algorithms build summaries, that are both
concise and diverse, by selecting appropriate segments from the input signal
which makes them good candidates to summarize music as well. We evaluate the
summarization process on binary and multiclass music genre classification
tasks, by comparing the performance obtained using summarized datasets against
the performances obtained using continuous segments (which is the traditional
method used for addressing the previously mentioned time constraints) and full
songs of the same original dataset. We show that GRASSHOPPER, LexRank, LSA,
MMR, and a Support Sets-based Centrality model improve classification
performance when compared to selected 30-second baselines. We also show that
summarized datasets lead to a classification performance whose difference is
not statistically significant from using full songs. Furthermore, we make an
argument stating the advantages of sharing summarized datasets for future MIR
research.
