Semantic Grounding of Tag Relatedness in Social Bookmarking Systems

Collaborative tagging systems have nowadays become important data sources for populating semantic web applications. For tasks like synonym detection and discovery of concept hierarchies, many researchers introduced measures of tag similarity. Even though most of these measures appear very natural, their design often seems to he rather ad hoc, and the underlying assumptions oil the notion of similarity ire not made explicit. A more systematic characterization and validation of tag similarity in terms of formal representations of knowledge is still lacking. Here we address this issue and analyze several measures of tag similarity: Each measure is computed oil data from the social bookmarking system del.icio.us and a semantic grounding is provided by mapping pairs of similar tags in the folksonomy to pairs of synsets in Wordnet, where we use validated measures of semantic distance to characterize the semantic relation between the mapped tags. This exposes important features of the investigated similarity measures and indicates which ones are better suited in the context of a given semantic application.