Detecting musical references in natural language search input

One or more computer storage media storing computer-useable instructions that, when used by one or more computing devices, cause the one or more computing devices to perform operations comprising:

• segmenting a natural language description of music into a plurality of spans;
• determining that one of the spans includes a reference to an artist or a title or a recording by identifying a search term from the span and using the search term to identify a matching record in a reference database;
• retrieving a set of musical features, of a music description and categorization schema, that are associated with the matching record;
• executing a search using the set of musical features to identify search results for the natural language description of music comprising matching songs in a music catalog that is indexed based on the music description and categorization schema;
• and
• causing a presentation of information about the matching songs.

A computer system comprising:

• one or more hardware processors and memory storing computer-useable instructions that, when used by the one or more hardware processors, cause the one or more hardware processors to perform operations comprising:
• segmenting a natural language description of music into a plurality of spans;
• determining that one of the spans includes a reference to an artist or a title or a recording by identifying a search term from the span and using the search term to identify a matching record in a reference database;
• retrieving a set of musical features, of a music description and categorization schema, that are associated with the matching record;
• executing a search using the set of musical features to identify search results for the natural language description of music comprising matching songs in a music catalog that is indexed based on the music description and categorization schema;
• and
• causing a presentation of information about the matching songs.