Learning Relations from Social Tagging Data

An interesting research direction is to discover structured knowledge from user generated data. Our work aims to find relations among social tags and organise them into hierarchies so as to better support discovery and search for online users. We cast relation discovery in this context to a binary classification problem in supervised learning. This approach takes as input features of two tags extracted using probabilistic topic modelling, and predicts whether a broader-narrower relation holds between them. Experiments were conducted using two large, real-world datasets, the Bibsonomy dataset which is used to extract tags and their features, and the DBpedia dataset which is used as the ground truth. Three sets of features were designed and extracted based on topic distributions, similarity and probabilistic associations. Evaluation results with respect to the ground truth demonstrate that our method outperforms existing ones based on various features and heuristics. Future studies are suggested to study the Knowledge Base Enrichment from folksonomies and deep neural network approaches to process tagging data

Improving on popularity as a proxy for generality when building tag hierarchies from Folksonomies 6th International Conference, SocInfo 2014

Building taxonomies for Web content manually is costly and time-consuming. An alternative is to allow users to create folksonomies: collective social classifications. However, folksonomies have inconsistent structures and their use for searching and browsing is limited. Approaches have been proposed for acquiring implicit hierarchical structures from folksonomies, but these approaches suffer from the “generality-popularity” problem, in that they assume that popularity is a proxy for generality (that high level taxonomic terms will occur more often than low level ones). In this paper we test this assumption, and propose an improved approach (based on the Heymann-Benz algorithm) for tackling this problem by direction checking relations against a corpus of text. Our results show that popularity works as a proxy for generality in at most 77% of cases, but that this can be improved to 81% using our approach. This improvement will translate to higher quality tag hierarchy structures