India sees a 23% rise in podcast listening after the Covid-19 pandemic.
The pandemic and screen fatigue led people to seek out old favourite
audio podcasts. Podcast genre classification allows listeners to compile
a playlist of their favourite tracks; this also helps podcast streaming
services provide recommendations to users based on the genre of the
podcasts they enjoy. After 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 our study, our developed PodGen
dataset is used, which consists of 550 podcasts of 5 minutes each and
have a total of 26,867 sentences, where every podcast has been 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 is used to demonstrate
accuracy. The best performance was observed in the case of the Support
Vector Classifier model with balanced accuracy:82.42%, precision
(weighted):83.09%, recall (weighted):82.42%, and F1
score(weighted):82.39% on testing data.