Download full text
(6.478Mb)
Citation Suggestion
Please use the following Persistent Identifier (PID) to cite this document:
https://nbn-resolving.org/urn:nbn:de:0168-ssoar-66081-7
Exports for your reference manager
Semantic stability in social tagging streams
[conference paper]
Abstract One potential disadvantage of social tagging systems is that due to the lack of a centralized vocabulary, a crowd of users may never manage to reach a consensus on the description of resources (e.g., books, users or songs) on the Web. Yet, previous research has provided interesting evidence that the... view more
One potential disadvantage of social tagging systems is that due to the lack of a centralized vocabulary, a crowd of users may never manage to reach a consensus on the description of resources (e.g., books, users or songs) on the Web. Yet, previous research has provided interesting evidence that the tag distributions of resources may become semantically stable over time as more and more users tag them. At the same time, previous work has raised an array of new questions such as: (i) How can we assess the semantic stability of social tagging systems in a robust and methodical way? (ii) Does semantic stabilization of tags vary across different social tagging systems and ultimately, (iii) what are the factors that can explain semantic stabilization in such systems? In this work we tackle these questions by (i) presenting a novel and robust method which overcomes a number of limitations in existing methods, (ii) empirically investigating semantic stabilization processes in a wide range of social tagging systems with distinct domains and properties and (iii) detecting potential causes for semantic stabilization, specifically imitation behavior, shared background knowledge and intrinsic properties of natural language. Our results show that tagging streams which are generated by a combination of imitation dynamics and shared background knowledge exhibit faster and higher semantic stability than tagging streams which are generated via imitation dynamics or natural language phenomena alone.... view less
Keywords
semantics; social media; comparison of methods; methodology; twitter; ranking; measurement; simulation; methodological research; internet community
Classification
Interactive, electronic Media
Natural Science and Engineering, Applied Sciences
Free Keywords
social tagging; emergent semantics; social semantics; distributional semantics; stabilization process; Stable Tag Proportions; Stable Tag Distributions; Power Law Fits
Collection Title
Proceedings of the 23rd International Conference on World Wide Web 2014
Conference
23. International Conference on World Wide Web (WWW'14). Seoul, 2014
Document language
English
Publication Year
2014
Publisher
ACM
City
New York
Page/Pages
p. 735-746
ISBN
978-1-4503-2744-2
Status
Published Version; peer reviewed
Licence
Deposit Licence - No Redistribution, No Modifications