Building a Playlist Generator with Sentence Transformers
<script async defer src="https://unpkg.com/medium-zoom-element@0/dist/medium-zoom-element.min.js"></script>
A short while ago I published a playlist generator that I’d built using Sentence Transformers and Gradio, and I followed that up with a reflection on how I try to use my projects as effective learning experiences. But how did I actually build the playlist generator? In this post we’ll break down that project and look at two technical details: how the embeddings were generated, and how the multi-step Gradio demo was built.
<iframe src="https://nimaboscarino-playlist-generator.hf.space" frameBorder="0" width="1400" height="690" title="Gradio app" class="p-0 flex-grow space-iframe" allow="accelerometer; ambient-light-sensor; autoplay; battery; camera; document-domain; encrypted-media; fullscreen; geolocation; gyroscope; layout-animations; legacy-image-formats; magnetometer; microphone; midi; oversized-images; payment; picture-in-picture; publickey-credentials-get; sync-xhr; usb; vr ; wake-lock; xr-spatial-tracking" sandbox="allow-forms allow-modals allow-popups allow-popups-to-escape-sandbox allow-same-origin allow-scripts allow-downloads"></iframe>
As we’ve explored in previous posts on the Hugging Face blog, Sentence Transformers (ST) is a library that gives us tools to generate sentence embeddings, which have a variety of uses. Since I had access to a dataset of song lyrics, I decided to leverage ST’s semantic search functionality to generate playlists from a given text prompt. Specifically, the goal was to create an embedding from the prompt, use that embedding for a semantic search across a set of pre-generated lyrics embeddings to generate a relevant set of songs. This would all be wrapped up in a Gradio app using the new Blocks API, hosted on Hugging Face Spaces.
We’ll be looking at a slightly advanced use of Gradio, so if you’re a beginner to the library I recommend reading the Introduction to Blocks before tackling the Gradio-specific parts of this post. Also, note that while I won’t be releasing the lyrics dataset, the lyrics embeddings are available on the Hugging Face Hub for you to play around with. Let’s jump in! 🪂
<script async defer src="https://unpkg.com/medium-zoom-element@0/dist/medium-zoom-element.min.js"></script>
A short while ago I published a playlist generator that I’d built using Sentence Transformers and Gradio, and I followed that up with a reflection on how I try to use my projects as effective learning experiences. But how did I actually build the playlist generator? In this post we’ll break down that project and look at two technical details: how the embeddings were generated, and how the multi-step Gradio demo was built.
<iframe src="https://nimaboscarino-playlist-generator.hf.space" frameBorder="0" width="1400" height="690" title="Gradio app" class="p-0 flex-grow space-iframe" allow="accelerometer; ambient-light-sensor; autoplay; battery; camera; document-domain; encrypted-media; fullscreen; geolocation; gyroscope; layout-animations; legacy-image-formats; magnetometer; microphone; midi; oversized-images; payment; picture-in-picture; publickey-credentials-get; sync-xhr; usb; vr ; wake-lock; xr-spatial-tracking" sandbox="allow-forms allow-modals allow-popups allow-popups-to-escape-sandbox allow-same-origin allow-scripts allow-downloads"></iframe>
As we’ve explored in previous posts on the Hugging Face blog, Sentence Transformers (ST) is a library that gives us tools to generate sentence embeddings, which have a variety of uses. Since I had access to a dataset of song lyrics, I decided to leverage ST’s semantic search functionality to generate playlists from a given text prompt. Specifically, the goal was to create an embedding from the prompt, use that embedding for a semantic search across a set of pre-generated lyrics embeddings to generate a relevant set of songs. This would all be wrapped up in a Gradio app using the new Blocks API, hosted on Hugging Face Spaces.
We’ll be looking at a slightly advanced use of Gradio, so if you’re a beginner to the library I recommend reading the Introduction to Blocks before tackling the Gradio-specific parts of this post. Also, note that while I won’t be releasing the lyrics dataset, the lyrics embeddings are available on the Hugging Face Hub for you to play around with. Let’s jump in! 🪂