Paper Info
Title
Stop thinking, start tagging: tag semantics emerge from collaborative verbosity
Abstract
Recent research provides evidence for the presence of emergent semantics in collaborative tagging systems. While several methods have been proposed, little is known about the factors that influence the evolution of semantic structures in these systems. A natural hypothesis is that the quality of the emergent semantics depends on the pragmatics of tagging: Users with certain usage patterns might contribute more to the resulting semantics than others. In this work, we propose several measures which enable a pragmatic differentiation of taggers by their degree of contribution to emerging semantic structures. We distinguish between categorizers, who typically use a small set of tags as a replacement for hierarchical classification schemes, and describers, who are annotating resources with a wealth of freely associated, descriptive keywords. To study our hypothesis, we apply semantic similarity measures to 64 different partitions of a real-world and large-scale folksonomy containing different ratios of categorizers and describers. Our results not only show that "verbose" taggers are most useful for the emergence of tag semantics, but also that a subset containing only 40% of the most 'verbose' taggers can produce results that match and even outperform the semantic precision obtained from the whole dataset. Moreover, the results suggest that there exists a causal link between the pragmatics of tagging and resulting emergent semantics. This work is relevant for designers and analysts of tagging systems interested (i) in fostering the semantic development of their platforms, (ii) in identifying users introducing "semantic noise", and (iii) in learning ontologies.
Year
DOI
Venue
2010
10.1145/1772690.1772744
WWW
Keywords
Field
DocType
semantic precision,emergent semantics,semantic similarity measure,tag semantics,different partition,semantic development,collaborative verbosity,collaborative tagging system,semantic noise,semantic structure,tagging system,semantics,semantic similarity,pragmatics
Data mining,Pragmatics,Computer science,Folksonomy,Natural language processing,Artificial intelligence,Small set,Verbosity,Ontology (information science),Semantic similarity,World Wide Web,Information retrieval,Existential quantification,Semantics
Conference
Citations 
PageRank 
References 
62
2.14
24
Authors
5
Name
Order
Citations
PageRank
Christian Körner131814.97
Dominik Benz250021.61
Andreas Hotho33232210.84
Markus Strohmaier41210102.65
Gerd Stumme54208301.17