Stop thinking, start tagging: tag semantics emerge from collaborative verbosity

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 diff...

• Type: Conference
• Year: 2010
• Where: WWW
• Authors: Christian Körner, Dominik Benz, Andreas Hotho, Markus Strohmaier, Gerd Stumme
• Keywords: Emergent Semantics, Internet Technology, Semantic, Semantic Structures, WWW 2010