Leveraging Network Analysis and NLP for Intelligent Data Mining of Taxonomies and Folksonomies of PornHub
Jan Sawicki, Loizos Bitsikokos, Yulia Belinskaya, Maria Ganzha, Marcin Paprzycki · Applied Sciences · 2025
This study explores graph-based methods to model and analyze the semantic interplay between editorial taxonomies and user-generated folksonomies on the PornHub platform, using a dataset of over 97,000 videos (2015–2024). We construct and examine a graph of user-assigned tags and platform-defined categories, applying the Leiden community detection algorithm to uncover latent semantic groupings. To enrich the graph structure, we embed textual metadata using state-of-the-art language models (Qwen3-Embedding-4B and all-MiniLM-L6-v2), enabling the integration of natural language processing within graph-based learning. Our analysis reveals that folksonomies partially align with taxonomies through synonymous structures but also diverge by capturing nuanced attributes such as body features and aesthetic styles. These asymmetries highlight how folksonomies introduce higher-resolution semantic layers absent from fixed-category systems. By fusing graph mining, NLP-driven embeddings, and network-based clustering, this work contributes a hybrid methodology for semantic knowledge extraction in large-scale, user-generated content. It offers implications for graph-based recommendation, content moderation, and metadata enrichment—demonstrating the utility of graph-centric AI techniques in real-world multimedia data settings.