Classifying users and identifying user interests in folksonomies
Elias Zavitsanos, George A. Vouros, Γεώργιος Παλιούρας · 2011
Abstract. This paper presents a probabilistic method for classifying folksonomy users to folksonomy sub-domains and identifying their particular interests. In particular, we propose a method for mining topic hierarchies that may reveal either the collective or the user-specific conceptualization of those domains, as these are reflected by users ’ tags. We then propose two alternatives for identifying users ’ interests in the domains: The first exploits users ’ tags directly, and the second exploits users ’ specific conceptualizations of each domain. Both approaches use the collective domain conceptualizations as “reference”, to which users ’ tags and conceptualizations are compared. The proposed statistical method is parametric-less and does not require any prior knowledge or external resources. We apply the proposed method on the Del.icio.us online bookmarking system and we provide experimental results. 1