Improving Search in Tag-Based Systems with Automatically Extracted Keywords

Tag-based systems are used by millions of web users to tag, save and share items. User-defined tags, however, are so variable in quality that searching on these tags alone is unsatisfactory. One way to improve search in book-marking systems is by adding more metadata to the user-created tags to enhance tag quality. The additional metadata we have used is based on document content and largely avoids the idiosyncratic and ambiguous terms too often evident in user-created tags. Such an approach adds value by incorporating information about the content of the resource while retaining the original user-created tags. This paper describes how users' tags can be enhanced with metadata automatically extracted from the original document. An experiment comparing search based only on user-created tags with search using an automatically enhanced tag set, demonstrates how incorporating the extra tags can offer significant benefits.