Semantic Stability in Social Tagging Streams

11 Pages Posted: 12 Oct 2013

See all articles by Claudia Wagner

Claudia Wagner

affiliation not provided to SSRN

Philipp Singer

Graz University of Technology

Markus Strohmaier

University of Koblenz-Landau

Bernardo A. Huberman

CableLabs

Date Written: October 8, 2013

Abstract

One potential disadvantage of social tagging systems is that due to the lack of a centralized vocabulary users may never manage to reach a consensus on the description of the entities (e.g., books, user or songs) in the system. Yet, previous research has provided interesting evidence that the tag distributions of entities can become 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 stability of social tagging systems in a robust and methodical way? (ii) Does 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 making the following contributions: (i) we present a novel and robust method which overcomes a number of limitations in existing methods, (ii) we empirically investigate semantic stabilization processes in a wide range of social tagging systems with distinct domains and properties and (iii) we investigate potential causes for semantic stabilization, specifically imitation behavior, shared background knowledge and intrinsic properties of natural language.

JEL Classification: E23,C92, D70, D83, M37

Suggested Citation

Wagner, Claudia and Singer, Philipp and Strohmaier, Markus and Huberman, Bernardo A., Semantic Stability in Social Tagging Streams (October 8, 2013). Available at SSRN: https://ssrn.com/abstract=2337823 or http://dx.doi.org/10.2139/ssrn.2337823

Claudia Wagner

affiliation not provided to SSRN

Philipp Singer

Graz University of Technology ( email )

Kopernikusgasse 24/IV
Graz University of Technology,
GRAZ, STYRIA A-8010
Austria

Markus Strohmaier

University of Koblenz-Landau ( email )

56070 Koblenz-Metternich
Germany

Bernardo A. Huberman (Contact Author)

CableLabs ( email )

400 W California Ave
Sunnyvale, CA 94086
United States

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