Constructing folksonomies from user-specified relations on flickr
WWW '09: Proceedings of the 18th international conference on World wide web, page 781--790. New York, NY, USA, ACM, (2009)DOI: http://doi.acm.org/10.1145/1526709.1526814
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.
