A network approach to topic summary and knowledge discovery in social tagging
Xin Xiang · Illinois Digital Environment for Access to Learning and Scholarship (University of Illinois at Urbana-Champaign) · 2011
This doctoral research focuses on studying the semantic relations between social tags, items and content creators through co-occurrence analysis, social network analysis and information visualization, thus revealing the role played by social tags in representing and classifying contents and creators, and implications they might have for facilitating information seeking practice, particularly knowledge discovery and information summary, and as a result, helping the design of information retrieval and browsing interface. A user study is conducted to evaluate the effectiveness of visual constructions based on similarity and network analysis for several tasks that they can be used to support. Both network analysis and user study suggest that tag/author networks contain strong community structures that are algorithmically detectable and semantically relevant.