An IR-based Approach for Tag Recommendation

Thanks to the continuous growth of collaborative platforms like YouTube, Flickr and Delicious, we are recently witnessing to a rapid evolution of web dynamics towards a more 'social' vision, called Web 2.0. In this context collaborative tagging systems are rapidly emerging as one of the most promising tools. However, as tags are handled in a simply syntactical way, collaborative tagging systems suffer of typical Information Retrieval (IR) problems like polysemy and synonymy: so, in order to reduce the impact of these drawbacks and to aid at the same time the so-called tag convergence, systems that assist the user in the task of tagging are required. In this paper we present a system, called STaR, that implements an IR-based approach for tag recommendation. Our approach, mainly based on the exploitation of a state-of-the-art IR-model called BM25, relies on two assumptions: firstly, if two or more resources share some common patterns (e.g. the same features in the textual description), we can exploit this information supposing that they could be annotated with similar tags. Furthermore, since each user has a typical manner to label resources, a tag recommender might exploit this information to weigh more the tags she already used to annotate similar resources. We also present an experimental evaluation, carried out using a large dataset gathered from Bibsonomy.