An examination of the effectiveness of social tagging for resource discovery

Research output: Chapter in Book/Report/Conference proceedingConference contribution

Abstract

Social tagging allows users to assign keywords (tags) to resources facilitating their future access by the tag creator, and possibly by other users. In terms of its support for resource discovery, social tagging has both proponents and critics. The goal of this paper investigates if tags are an effective means for helping users locate useful resources. Adopting techniques from text categorization, we downloaded Web pages and their associated tags from del.icio.us, and trained Support Vector Machine classifiers to determine if the documents could be assigned to their associated tags. Results from the classifiers in terms of precision, recall and Fl score were mixed, suggesting that that not all tags could be used by public users for resource discovery. Detailed analyses of our results revealed characteristics of effective and ineffective tags for resource discovery. From these, implications for social tagging systems are discussed.

Original languageEnglish
Title of host publicationProceedings - 2008 1st International Workshop on Information-Explosion and Next Generation Search, INGS 2008
Pages23-30
Number of pages8
DOIs
Publication statusPublished - 2008
Externally publishedYes
Event2008 1st International Workshop on Information-Explosion and Next Generation Search, INGS 2008 - Shenyang, China
Duration: Apr 26 2008Apr 27 2008

Publication series

NameProceedings - 2008 International Workshop on Information-Explosion and Next Generation Search, INGS 2008

Conference

Conference2008 1st International Workshop on Information-Explosion and Next Generation Search, INGS 2008
Country/TerritoryChina
CityShenyang
Period4/26/084/27/08

ASJC Scopus Subject Areas

  • Computer Networks and Communications
  • Information Systems

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