The information contained in social tagging systems is often modelled as a graph of connections between users, items and tags. Recommendation algorithms such as FolkRank, have the potential to leverage complex relationships in the data, corresponding to multiple hops in the graph. We present an in-depth analysis and evaluation of graph models for social tagging data and propose novel adaptations and extensions of FolkRank to improve tag recommendations. We highlight implicit assumptions made by the widely used folksonomy model, and propose an alternative and more accurate graph-representation of the data. Our extensions of FolkRank address the new item problem by incorporating content data into the algorithm, and significantly improve prediction results on unpruned datasets. Our adaptations address issues in the iterative weight spreading calculation that potentially hinder FolkRank's ability to leverage the deep graph as an information source. Moreover, we evaluate the benefit of considering each deeper level of the graph, and present important insights regarding the characteristics of social tagging data in general. Our results suggest that the base assumption made by conventional weight propagation methods, that closeness in the graph always implies a positive relationship, does not hold for the social tagging domain.

The ever-growing flood of new scientific articles requires novel retrieval mechanisms. One means for mitigating this instance of the information overload phenomenon are collaborative tagging systems, that allow users to select, share and annotate references to publications. These systems employ recommendation algorithms to present to their users personalized lists of interesting and relevant publications. In this paper we analyze different ways to incorporate social data and metadata from collaborative tagging systems into the graph-based ranking algorithm FolkRank to utilize it for recommending scientific articles to users of the social bookmarking system BibSonomy. We compare the results to those of Collaborative Filtering, which has previously been applied for resource recommendation.

Real-world tagging datasets have a large proportion of new/ untagged documents. Few approaches for recommending tags to a user for a document address this new item problem, concentrating instead on artificially created post-core datasets where it is guaranteed that the user as well as the document of each test post is known to the system and already has some tags assigned to it. In order to recommend tags for new documents, approaches are required which model documents not only based on the tags assigned to them in the past (if any), but also the content. In this paper we present a novel adaptation to the widely recognised FolkRank tag recommendation algorithm by including content data. We adapt the FolkRank graph to use word nodes instead of document nodes, enabling it to recommend tags for new documents based on their textual content. Our adaptations make FolkRank applicable to post-core 1 ie. the full real-world tagging datasets and address the new item problem in tag recommendation. For comparison, we also apply and evaluate the same methodology of including content on a simpler tag recommendation algorithm. This results in a less expensive recommender which suggests a combination of user related and document content related tags.</p> <p>Including content data into FolkRank shows an improvement over plain FolkRank on full tagging datasets. However, we also observe that our simpler content-aware tag recommender outperforms FolkRank with content data. Our results suggest that an optimisation of the weighting method of FolkRank is required to achieve better results.

Social tagging is one of the most important ways to organize and index online resources. Recommendation in social tagging systems, e.g. tag recommendation, item recommendation and user recommendation, is used to improve the quality of tags and to ease the tagging or searching process. Existing works usually provide recommendations by analyzing relation information in social tagging systems, suffering a lot from the over sparse problem. These approaches ignore information contained in the content of resources, which we believe should be considered to improve recommendation quality and to deal with the over sparse problem. In this paper we propose a recommendation approach for social tagging systems that combines content and relation analysis in a single model. By modeling the generating process of social tagging systems in a latent Dirichlet allocation approach, we build a fully generative model for social tagging, leverage it to estimate the relation between users, tags and resources and achieve tag, item and user recommendation tasks. The model is evaluated using a CiteULike data snapshot, and results show improvements in metrics for various recommendation tasks.

This paper looks inside FolkRank, one of the well-known folksonomy-based algorithms, to present its fundamental properties and promising possibilities for improving performance in tag recommendations. Moreover, we introduce a new way to compute a differential approach in FolkRank by representing it as a linear combination of the personalized PageRank vectors. By the linear combination, we present FolkRank's probabilistic interpretation that grasps how FolkRank works on a folksonomy graph in terms of the random surfer model. We also propose new FolkRank-like methods for tag recommendations to efficiently compute tags' rankings and thus reduce expensive computational cost of FolkRank. We show that the FolkRank approaches are feasible to recommend tags in real-time scenarios as well. The experimental evaluations show that the proposed methods provide fast tag recommendations with reasonable quality, as compared to FolkRank. Additionally, we discuss the diversity of the top n tags recommended by FolkRank and its variants.

Users tag resources for a variety of reasons and using a variety of conventions. The tags that they provide are stored in social bookmarking services, so these services can provide a rich gateway to a wide and interesting quantity of web resources. The cognitive effort that has gone into making these tags has presumably added value to the description of the resource. In this work we utilize the quantitative value of these tags for ranking bookmarked web resources in social bookmarking services. Our proposed solution is called CoolRank, a simple and intuitive model to rank bookmarked web resources in a social bookmarking service, such as del.icio.us. CoolRank makes use of both quantitative information, based on the number of people who have bookmarked a web resource, and subjective information, based on the words people have used in their tags.

In social bookmark tools users are setting up lightweight conceptual structures called folksonomies. Currently, the information retrieval support is limited. We present a formal model and a new search algorithm for folksonomies, called FolkRank, that exploits the structure of the folksonomy. The proposed algorithm is also applied to find communities within the folksonomy and is used to structure search results. All findings are demonstrated on a large scale dataset. A long version of this paper has been published at the European Semantic Web Conference 2006.