Social bookmarking systems allow users to organise collections of resources on the Web in a collaborative fashion. The increasing popularity of these systems as well as first insights into their emergent semantics have made them relevant to disciplines like knowledge extraction and ontology learning. The problem of devising methods to measure the semantic relatedness between tags and characterizing it semantically is still largely open. Here we analyze three measures of tag relatedness: tag co-occurrence, cosine similarity of co-occurrence distributions, and FolkRank, an adaptation of the PageRank algorithm to folksonomies. Each measure is computed on tags from a large-scale dataset crawled from the social bookmarking system del.icio.us. To provide a semantic grounding of our findings, a connection to WordNet (a semantic lexicon for the English language) is established by mapping tags into synonym sets of WordNet, and applying there well-known metrics of semantic similarity. Our results clearly expose different characteristics of the selected measures of relatedness, making them applicable to different subtasks of knowledge extraction such as synonym detection or discovery of concept hierarchies.

Recent work has shown improvements in text clustering and classification tasks by integrating conceptual features extracted from ontologies. In this paper we present text mining experiments in the medical domain in which the ontological structures used are acquired automatically in an unsupervised learning process from the text corpus in question. We compare results obtained using the automatically learned ontologies with those obtained using manually engineered ones. Our results show that both types of ontologies improve results on text clustering and classification tasks, whereby the automatically acquired ontologies yield a improvement competitive with the manually engineered ones. ER -