Paper Info
Title
Combating Spam in Tagging Systems
Abstract
Tagging systems allow users to interactively annotate a pool of shared resources using descriptive strings, which are called tags. Tags are used to guide users to interesting resources and help them build communities that share their expertise and resources. As tagging systems are gaining in popularity, they become more susceptible to tag spam: misleading tags that are generated in order to increase the visibility of some resources or simply to confuse users. Our goal is to under- stand this problem better. In particular, we are interested in answers to questions such as: How many malicious users can a tagging system tolerate before results significantly de- grade? What types of tagging systems are more vulnerable to malicious attacks? What would be the effort and the im- pact of employing a trusted moderator to find bad postings? Can a system automatically protect itself from spam, for in- stance, by exploiting user tag patterns? In a quest for an- swers to these questions, we introduce a framework for mod- eling tagging systems and user tagging behavior. We also describe a method for ranking documents matching a tag based on taggers' reliability. Using our framework, we study the behavior of existing approaches under malicious attacks and the impact of a moderator and our ranking method.
Year
DOI
Venue
2007
10.1145/1244408.1244420
Adversarial Information Retrieval on the Web
Keywords
Field
DocType
ranking document,tag spam,tagging systems,ranking method,misleading tag,tagging system,combating spam,descriptive tag,social systems,shared resource,malicious attack,social system
Visibility,World Wide Web,Information retrieval,Ranking,Computer science,Popularity
Conference
Citations 
PageRank 
References 
81
7.54
13
Authors
5
Name
Order
Citations
PageRank
Georgia Koutrika1150590.77
Frans Adjie Effendi21188.92
Zoltán Gyöngyi392667.74
Paul Heymann480242.43
Héctor García-Molina5243595652.13