Constructing folksonomies from user-specified relations on flickr

  • Authors:
  • Anon Plangprasopchok;Kristina Lerman

  • Affiliations:
  • USC Information Sciences Institute, Marina del Rey, CA, USA;USC Information Sciences Institute, Marina del Rey, CA, USA

  • Venue:
  • Proceedings of the 18th international conference on World wide web
  • Year:
  • 2009

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Abstract

Automatic folksonomy construction from tags has attracted much attention recently. However, inferring hierarchical relations between concepts from tags has a drawback in that it is difficult to distinguish between more popular and more general concepts. Instead of tags we propose to use user-specified relations for learning folksonomy. We explore two statistical frameworks for aggregating many shallow individual hierarchies, expressed through the collection/set relations on the social photosharing site Flickr, into a common deeper folksonomy that reflects how a community organizes knowledge. Our approach addresses a number of challenges that arise while aggregating information from diverse users, namely noisy vocabulary, and variations in the granularity level of the concepts expressed. Our second contribution is a method for automatically evaluating learned folksonomy by comparing it to a reference taxonomy, e.g., the Web directory created by the Open Directory Project. Our empirical results suggest that user-specified relations are a good source of evidence for learning folksonomies.