Semantic Communities and Boundary-Spanning Lyrics in K-pop: A Graph-Based Unsupervised Analysis

Oktay Karakuş

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arXiv · 2602.12881

Semantic Communities and Boundary-Spanning Lyrics in K-pop: A Graph-Based Unsupervised Analysis

Oktay Karakuş

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Abstract

Large-scale lyric corpora present unique challenges for data-driven analysis, including the absence of reliable annotations, multilingual content, and high levels of stylistic repetition. Most existing approaches rely on supervised classification, genre labels, or coarse document-level representations, limiting their ability to uncover latent semantic structure. We present a graph-based framework for unsupervised discovery and evaluation of semantic communities in K-pop lyrics using line-level semantic representations. By constructing a similarity graph over lyric texts and applying community detection, we uncover stable micro-theme communities without genre, artist, or language supervision. We further identify boundary-spanning songs via graph-theoretic bridge metrics and analyse their structural properties. Across multiple robustness settings, boundary-spanning lyrics exhibit higher lexical diversity and lower repetition compared to core community members, challenging the assumption that hook intensity or repetition drives cross-theme connectivity. Our framework is language-agnostic and applicable to unlabeled cultural text corpora.

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Oktay Karakuş. 2026-02-13. Semantic Communities and Boundary-Spanning Lyrics in K-pop: A Graph-Based Unsupervised Analysis. https://arxiv.org/abs/2602.12881

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