%0 Conference Paper
%1 plangprasopchok2009
%A Plangprasopchok, A.
%A Lerman, K.
%B WWW '09: Proceedings of the 18th international conference on World wide web
%C New York, NY, USA
%D 2009
%I ACM
%K folksonomy learning ol relation tagging taggingsurvey
%P 781--790
%T Constructing folksonomies from user-specified relations on flickr
%U http://www2009.org/proceedings/pdf/p781.pdf
%X Automatic folksonomy construction from tags has attracted much attention recently. However, inferring hierarchical relations between concepts from tags has a drawback in that it is difficult to distinguish between more popular and more general concepts. Instead of tags we propose to use user-specified relations for learning folksonomy. We explore two statistical frameworks for aggregating many shallow individual hierarchies, expressed through the collection/set relations on the social photosharing site Flickr, into a common deeper folksonomy that reflects how a community organizes knowledge. Our approach addresses a number of challenges that arise while aggregating information from diverse users, namely noisy vocabulary, and variations in the granularity level of the concepts expressed. Our second contribution is a method for automatically evaluating learned folksonomy by comparing it to a reference taxonomy, e.g., the Web directory created by the Open Directory Project. Our empirical results suggest that user-specified relations are a good source of evidence for learning folksonomies.