A hybrid approach to constructing tag hierarchies

Abstract

Folksonomies are becoming increasingly popular. They contain large amounts of data which can be mined and utilized for many tasks like visualization, browsing, information retrieval etc. An inherent problem of folksonomies is the lack of structure. In this paper we present an unsupervised approach for generating such structure based on a combination of association rule mining and the underlying tagged material. Using the underlying tagged material we generate a semantic representation of each tag. The semantic representation of the tags is an integral component of the structure generated. The experiment presented in this paper shows promising results with tag structures that correspond well with human judgment. © 2010 Springer-Verlag.