the most metal words of all time

At Degenerate State, there was an interesting post where someone applied natural language processing models to heavy metal lyrics. From the article:

To get the lyrics, I scraped www.darklyrics.com. While darklyrics doesn’t have a robots.txt file, I tried to be gentle with my requests. After cleaning the data up, identifying the languages and splitting albums into songs, we are left with a dataset containing lyrics to 222,623 songs from 7,364 bands spread over 22,314 albums.

Before anyone asks, I have no intention of releasing either the raw lyric files or the code used to scrape the website. I collected the lyrics for my own entertainment, and it would be too easy for someone to use this data to copy darklyrics. If people are interested I may release some n-gram data of the corpus.

So what do you find? A few tidbits  – the heavy metal word cloud:

Then, the most “metal words:”

Rank	Word	Metalness
1	burn	3.81
2	cries	3.63
3	veins	3.59
4	eternity	3.56
5	breathe	3.54
6	beast	3.54
7	gonna	3.53
8	demons	3.53
9	ashes	3.51
10	soul	3.40
11	sorrow	3.40
12	sword	3.38
13	goodbye	3.28
14	dreams	3.28
15	gods	3.24
16	pray	3.22
17	reign	3.15
18	tear	3.12
19	flames	3.12
20	scream	3.11

And the least metal words:

Rank	Word	Metalness
1	particularly	-6.47
2	indicated	-6.32
3	secretary	-6.29
4	committee	-6.16
5	university	-6.09
6	relatively	-6.08
7	noted	-5.85
8	approximately	-5.75
9	chairman	-5.69
10	employees	-5.67
11	attorney	-5.66
12	membership	-5.64
13	administrative	-5.61
14	considerable	-5.60
15	academic	-5.51
16	literary	-5.49
17	agencies	-5.48
18	measurements	-5.47
19	fiscal	-5.45
20	residential	-5.45

The bottom line? Academia, the law and administration are the least metal topics of all time. Who knew?

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