This paper deals with the problem of exploring hierarchical semantics from social annotations. Recently, social annotationservices have become more and more popular in Semantic Web. It allows users to arbitrarily annotate web resources, thus, largelylowers the barrier to cooperation. Furthermore, through providing abundant meta-data resources, social annotation might becomea key to the development of Semantic Web. However, on the other hand, social annotation has its own apparent limitations,for instance, 1) ambiguity and synonym phenomena and 2) lack of hierarchical information. In this paper, we propose an unsupervisedmodel to automatically derive hierarchical semantics from social annotations. Using a social bookmark service Del.icio.usas example, we demonstrate that the derived hierarchical semantics has the ability to compensate those shortcomings. We furtherapply our model on another data set from Flickr to testify our model’s applicability on different environments. The experimentalresults demonstrate our model’s efficiency.
