Detecting synonyms in social tagging systems to improve content retrieval

Collaborative tagging used in online social content systems is naturally characterized by many synonyms, causing low precision retrieval. We propose a mechanism based on user preference profiles to identify synonyms that can be used to retrieve more relevant documents by expanding the user's query. Using a popular online book catalog we discuss the effectiveness of our method over usual similarity based expansion methods. Categories and Subject Descriptors: H.3.3 [Information Storage and Retrieval]: Information Search and Retrieval General Terms: Algorithms, Languages.

• Type: Journal
• Year: 2008
• Where: SIGIR
• Authors: Maarten Clements, Arjen P. de Vries, Marcel J. T. Reinders
• Keywords: Information Technology, Low Precision Retrieval, SIGIR 2008, Social Content Systems, User Preference Profiles