Understanding why users tag: A survey of tagging motivation literature and results from an empirical study

While recent progress has been achieved in understanding the structure and dynamics of social tagging systems, we know little about the underlying user motivations for tagging, and how they influence resulting folksonomies and tags. This paper addresses three issues related to this question. (1) What distinctions of user motivations are identified by previous research, and in what ways are the motivations of users amenable to quantitative analysis? (2) To what extent does tagging motivation vary across different social tagging systems? (3) How does variability in user motivation influence resulting tags and folksonomies? In this paper, we present measures to detect whether a tagger is primarily motivated by categorizing or describing resources, and apply these measures to datasets from seven different tagging systems. Our results show that (a) users’ motivation for tagging varies not only across, but also within tagging systems, and that (b) tag agreement among users who are motivated by categorizing resources is significantly lower than among users who are motivated by describing resources. Our findings are relevant for (1) the development of tag-based user interfaces, (2) the analysis of tag semantics and (3) the design of search algorithms for social tagging systems.     

Understanding why users tag: A survey of tagging motivation literature and results from an empirical study

While recent progress has been achieved in understanding the structure and dynamics of social tagging systems, we know little about the underlying user motivations for tagging, and how they influence resulting folksonomies and tags. This paper addresses three issues related to this question. (1) What distinctions of user motivations are identified by previous research, and in what ways are the motivations of users amenable to quantitative analysis? (2) To what extent does tagging motivation vary across different social tagging systems? (3) How does variability in user motivation influence resulting tags and folksonomies? In this paper, we present measures to detect whether a tagger is primarily motivated by categorizing or describing resources, and apply these measures to datasets from seven different tagging systems. Our results show that (a) users’ motivation for tagging varies not only across, but also within tagging systems, and that (b) tag agreement among users who are motivated by categorizing resources is significantly lower than among users who are motivated by describing resources. Our findings are relevant for (1) the development of tag-based user interfaces, (2) the analysis of tag semantics and (3) the design of search algorithms for social tagging systems.     

Folksonomy‐Based Recommender Systems: A State‐of‐the‐Art Review

Collaborative tagging systems, also known as folksonomies, have grown in popularity over the Web on account of their simplicity to organize several types of content (e.g., Web pages, pictures, and video) using open‐ended tags. The rapid adoption of these systems has led to an increasing amount of users providing information about themselves and, at the same time, a growing and rich corpus of social knowledge that can be exploited by recommendation technologies. In this context, tripartite relationships between users, resources, and tags contained in folksonomies set new challenges for knowledge discovery approaches to be applied for the purposes of assisting users through recommendation systems. This review aims at providing a comprehensive overview of the literature in the field of folksonomy‐based recommender systems. Current recommendation approaches stemming from fields such as user modeling, collaborative filtering, content, and link‐analysis are reviewed and discussed to provide a starting point for researchers in the field as well as explore future research lines.     

i-TagRanker: an efficient tag ranking system for image sharing and retrieval using the semantic relationships between tags

Folksonomy, considered a core component for Web 2.0 user-participation architecture, is a classification system made by user’s tags on the web resources. Recently, various approaches for image retrieval exploiting folksonomy have been proposed to improve the result of image search. However, the characteristics of the tags such as semantic ambiguity and non-controlledness limit the effectiveness of tags on image retrieval. Especially, tags associated with images in a random order do not provide any information about the relevance between a tag and an image. In this paper, we propose a novel image tag ranking system called i-TagRanker which exploits the semantic relationships between tags for re-ordering the tags according to the relevance with an image. The proposed system consists of two phases: 1) tag propagation phase, 2) tag ranking phase. In tag propagation phase, we first collect the most relevant tags from similar images, and then propagate them to an untagged image. In tag ranking phase, tags are ranked according to their semantic relevance to the image. From the experimental results on a Flickr photo collection about over 30,000 images, we show the effectiveness of the proposed system.     

Sense induction in folksonomies: a review

Folksonomies, often known as tagging systems, such as the ones used on the popular Delicious or Flickr websites, use a very simple Knowledge Organisation System. Users have thus been quick to adopt this system and create extensive annotations on the Web. However, because of the simplicity of the folksonomy model, the semantics of the tags used is not explicit and can only be inferred from their context of use. This is a barrier for the automatic use of such Knowledge Organisation Systems by computers and new techniques have been developed to extract the semantic of the tags. In this article we discuss the drawbacks of some of these approaches and propose a generalization of the different approaches to detect new senses of terms in a folksonomy. Another weak point of the current state of the art in the field is the lack of formal evaluation methodology; we thus propose a novel evaluation framework. We introduce a dataset and evaluation methodology that enable the comparison of results between different approaches to sense induction in folksonomies. Finally we discuss the performances of different approaches to the task of homonymous/polysemous tag detection and synonymous identification.     

Exploitation of semantic relationships and hierarchical data structures to support a user in his annotation and browsing activities in folksonomies

In this paper we present a new approach to supporting users to annotate and browse resources referred by a folksonomy. Our approach is characterized by the following novelties: (i) it proposes a probabilistic technique to quickly and accurately determine the similarity and the generalization degrees of two tags; (ii) it proposes two hierarchical structures and two related algorithms to arrange groups of semantically related tags in a hierarchy; this allows users to visualize tags of their interests according to desired semantic granularities and, then, helps them to find those tags best expressing their information needs. In this paper we first illustrate the technical characteristics of our approach; then we describe various experiments allowing its performance to be tested; finally, we compare it with other related approaches already proposed in the literature.     

Folksonomy link prediction based on a tripartite graph for tag recommendation

Nowadays social tagging has become a popular way to annotate, search, navigate and discover online resources, in turn leading to the sheer amount of user-generated metadata. This paper addresses the problem of recommending suitable tags during folksonomy development from a graph-based perspective. The proposed approach adapts the Katz measure, a path-ensemble based proximity measure, for the use in social tagging systems. We model a folksonomy as a weighted, undirected tripartite graph. We then apply the Katz measure to this graph, and exploit it to provide tag recommendations for individual users. We evaluate our method on two real-world folksonomies collected from CiteULike and Last.fm. The experimental results demonstrate that the proposed method improves the recommendation performance and is effective for both active taggers and cold-start taggers compared to existing algorithms.     

Summarizing dynamic Social Tagging Systems

Social tagging is a popular method that allows users of social networks to share annotation in the form of keywords, called tags, assigned to resources. Social tagging addresses information overload by easing the task of locating interesting entities in a social network. Nevertheless, users can still be overwhelmed by too many tags posted at each moment. A process is needed that offers an accurate overview of the representative entities and their relationships with each other, while dealing with the dynamics of social tagging and of tags’ semantics. We propose a method for the automated summarization of an evolving multi-modal social network, focusing on the entities that stay representative over time for some subnetwork in the social tagging system. We report on experiments with real data from the Bibsonomy social tagging system, where we compare our dynamic approach with a static one.     

Community-Aware Resource Profiling for Personalized Search in Folksonomy

In recent years,there is a fast proliferation of collaborative tagging(a.k.a.folksonomy) systems in Web 2.0 communities.With the increasingly large amount of data,how to assist users in searching their interested resources by utilizing these semantic tags becomes a crucial problem.Collaborative tagging systems provide an environment for users to annotate resources,and most users give annotations according to their perspectives or feelings.However,users may have different perspectives or feelings on resources,e.g.,some of them may share similar perspectives yet have a conflict with others.Thus,modeling the profile of a resource based on tags given by all users who have annotated the resource is neither suitable nor reasonable.We propose,to tackle this problem in this paper,a community-aware approach to constructing resource profiles via social filtering.In order to discover user communities,three different strategies are devised and discussed.Moreover,we present a personalized search approach by combining a switching fusion method and a revised needs-relevance function,to optimize personalized resources ranking based on user preferences and user issued query.We conduct experiments on a collected real life dataset by comparing the performance of our proposed approach and baseline methods.The experimental results verify our observations and effectiveness of proposed method.     

A query expansion and user profile enrichment approach to improve the performance of recommender systems operating on a folksonomy

In this paper we propose a query expansion and user profile enrichment approach to improve the performance of recommender systems operating on a folksonomy, storing and classifying the tags used to label a set of available resources. Our approach builds and maintains a profile for each user. When he submits a query (consisting of a set of tags) on this folksonomy to retrieve a set of resources of his interest, it automatically finds further “authoritative” tags to enrich his query and proposes them to him. All “authoritative” tags considered interesting by the user are exploited to refine his query and, along with those tags directly specified by him, are stored in his profile in such a way to enrich it. The expansion of user queries and the enrichment of user profiles allow any content-based recommender system operating on the folksonomy to retrieve and suggest a high number of resources matching with user needs and desires. Moreover, enriched user profiles can guide any collaborative filtering recommender system to proactively discover and suggest to a user many resources relevant to him, even if he has not explicitly searched for them.     

Tag recommendation method in folksonomy based on user tagging status

A folksonomy consists of three basic entities, namely users, tags and resources. This kind of social tagging system is a good way to index information, facilitate searches and navigate resources. The main objective of this paper is to present a novel method to improve the quality of tag recommendation. According to the statistical analysis, we find that the total number of tags used by a user changes over time in a social tagging system. Thus, this paper introduces the concept of user tagging status, namely the growing status, the mature status and the dormant status. Then, the determining user tagging status algorithm is presented considering a user’s current tagging status to be one of the three tagging status at one point. Finally, three corresponding strategies are developed to compute the tag probability distribution based on the statistical language model in order to recommend tags most likely to be used by users. Experimental results show that the proposed method is better than the compared methods at the accuracy of tag recommendation.     

A collaborative desktop tagging system for group knowledge management based on concept space

The advent of internet has led to a significant growth in the amount of information available, resulting in information overload, i.e. individuals have too much information to make a decision. To resolve this problem, collaborative tagging systems form a categorization called folksonomy in order to organize web resources. A folksonomy aggregates the results of personal free tagging of information and objects to form a categorization structure that applies utilizes the collective intelligence of crowds. Folksonomy is more appropriate for organizing huge amounts of information on the Web than traditional taxonomies established by expert cataloguers. However, the attributes of collaborative tagging systems and their folksonomy make them impractical for organizing resources in personal environments.This work designs a desktop collaborative tagging (DCT) system that enables collaborative workers to tag their documents. This work proposes an application in patent analysis based on the DCT system. Folksonomy in DCT is built by aggregating personal tagging results, and is represented by a concept space. Concept spaces provide synonym control, tag recommendation and relevant search. Additionally, to protect privacy of authors and to decrease the transmission cost, relations between tagged and untagged documents are constructed by extracting document’s features rather than adopting the full text.Experimental results reveal that the adoption rate of recommended tags for new documents increases by 10% after users have tagged five or six documents. Furthermore, DCT can recommend tags with higher adoption rates when given new documents with similar topics to previously tagged ones. The relevant search in DCT is observed to be superior to keyword search when adopting frequently used tags as queries. The average precision, recall, and F-measure of DCT are 12.12%, 23.08%, and 26.92% higher than those of keyword searching.DCT allows a multi-faceted categorization of resources for collaborative workers and recommends tags for categorizing resources to simplify categorization easier. Additionally, DCT system provides relevance searching, which is more effective than traditional keyword searching for searching personal resources.     

基于社会标注质量的文本分类模型框架

社会标注是一种用户对网络资源的大众分类,蕴含了丰富的语义信息,因此将社会标注应用到信息检索技术中有助于提高信息检索的质量。研究了一种基于社会标注的文本分类改进算法以提高网页分类的效果。由于社会标注属于大众分类,标注的产生具有很大的随意性,标注的质量差别很大,因此首先利用文档间的语义相似度以及标注间的语义相似度来对标注的质量进行量化评估。在此基础上对标注进行质量过滤,利用质量相对较好的标注对文档向量空间模型进行扩展,将文档表示成由文档单词以及文档标注信息组成的扩展向量。同时采用支持向量机分类算法进行分类实验。实验结果表明,通过对标注进行质量评估并过滤质量差的标注,同时结合文档内容以及标注来对文档能提高分类的效果,同传统的基于文档内容的分类算法相比,分类结果的F1度量值提高了6.2%。     

Adaptive content recommendation for mobile users: Ordering recommendations using a hierarchical context model with granularity

Retrieving timely and relevant information on-site is an important task for mobile users. A context-aware system can understand a user’s information needs and thus select contents according to relevance. We propose a context-dependent search engine that represents user context in a knowledge-based context model, implemented in a hierarchical structure with granularity information. Search results are ordered based on semantic relevance computed as similarity between the current context and tags of search results. Compared against baseline algorithms, the proposed approach enhances precision by 22% and pooled recall by 17%. The use of size-based granularity to compute similarity makes the approach more robust against changes in the context model in comparison to graph-based methods, facilitating import of existing knowledge repositories and end-user defined vocabularies (folksonomies). The reasoning engine being light-weight, privacy protection is ensured, as all user information is processed locally on the user’s phone without requiring communication with an external server.     

Agent-mediated shared conceptualizations in tagging services

Some of the most remarkable innovative technologies from the Web 2.0 are the collaborative tagging systems. They allow the use of folksonomies as a useful structure for a number of tasks in the social web, such as navigation and knowledge organization. One of the main deficiencies comes from the tagging behaviour of different users which causes semantic heterogeneity in tagging. As a consequence a user cannot benefit from the adequate tagging of others. In order to solve the problem, an agent-based reconciliation knowledge system, based on Formal Concept Analysis, is applied to facilitate the semantic interoperability between personomies. This article describes experiments that focus on conceptual structures produced by the system when it is applied to a collaborative tagging service, Delicious. Results will show the prevalence of shared tags in the sharing of common resources in the reconciliation process.     

A social tag clustering method based on common co-occurrence group similarity

Social tagging systems are widely applied in Web 2.0. Many users use these systems to create, organize, manage, and share Internet resources freely. However, many ambiguous and uncontrolled tags produced by social tagging systems not only worsen users’ experience, but also restrict resources’ retrieval efficiency. Tag clustering can aggregate tags with similar semantics together, and help mitigate the above problems. In this paper, we first present a common co-occurrence group similarity based approach, which employs the ternary relation among users, resources, and tags to measure the semantic relevance between tags. Then we propose a spectral clustering method to address the high dimensionality and sparsity of the annotating data. Finally, experimental results show that the proposed method is useful and efficient.     

DYSCS: A platform to build geographically and semantically enhanced social content sites

Social content sites allow ordinary internet users to upload, edit, share, and annotate Web content with freely chosen keywords called tags. However, tags are only useful to the extent that they are processable by users and machines, which is often not the case since users frequently provide ambiguous and idiosyncratic tags. Thereby, many social content sites are starting to allow users to enrich their tags with semantic metadata, such as the GeoSocial Content Sites, for example, where users can annotate their tags with geographic metadata. But geographic metadata alone only unveils a very specific facet of a tag, which leads to the need for more general purpose semantic metadata. This paper introduces DYSCS – Do it Yourself Social Content Sites – a platform that combines Web 2.0 and Semantic Web technologies for assisting users in creating their own social content sites enriched with geographic and general purpose semantics. Moreover, DYSCS is highly reusable and interoperable, which are consequences of its ontology driven architecture.