Beyond Your Interests: Exploring the Information Behind User Tags

Tags have been used in different social medias, such as Delicious, Flickr, LinkedIn and Weibo. In previous work, considerable efforts have been made to make use of tags without identification of their different types. In this study, we argue that tags in user profile indicate three different types of information, say

the basics

(age, status, locality, etc),

interests

and

specialty

of a person. Based on this novel user tag taxonomy, we propose a tag classification approach in Weibo to conduct a clearer image of user profiles, which makes use of three categories of features: general statistics feature (including user links with followers and followings), content feature and syntax feature. Furthermore, different from many previous studies on tag which concentrate on user specialties, such as expert finding, we find that valuable information can be discovered with

the basics

and

interests

user tags. We show some interesting findings in two scenarios, including user profiling with people come from different generations and area profiling with mass appeal, with large scale tag clustering and mining in over 6 million identical tags with 13 million users in Weibo data.