Beyond your interests: Exploring the information behind user tags

Abstract

Tags have been used in different social medias, such as Delicious, Flickr, LinkedIn and Weibo. In previous work, considerable efforts have been made to make use of tags without identification of their different types. In this study, we argue that tags in user profile indicate three different types of information, say the basics (age, status, locality, etc), interests and specialty of a person. Based on this novel user tag taxonomy, we propose a tag classification approach in Weibo to conduct a clearer image of user profiles, which makes use of three categories of features: general statistics feature (including user links with followers and followings), content feature and syntax feature. Furthermore, different from many previous studies on tag which concentrate on user specialties, such as expert finding, we find that valuable information can be discovered with the basics and interests user tags. We show some interesting findings in two scenarios, including user profiling with people coming from different generations and area profiling with mass appeal, with large scale tag clustering and mining in over 6 million identical tags with 13 million users in Weibo data.