The Art of Tagging: Measuring the Quality of Tags

Collaborative tagging, supported by many social networking websites, is currently enjoying an increasing popularity. The usefulness of this largely available tag data has been explored in many applications including web resources categorization,deriving emergent semantics, web search etc. However, since tags are supplied by users

freely

, not all of them are useful and reliable, especially when they are generated by spammers with malicious intent. Therefore, identifying tags of high quality is crucial in improving the performance of applications based on tags. In this paper, we propose TRP-Rank (Tag-Resource Pair Rank), an algorithm to measure the quality of tags by manually assessing a seed set and

propagating the quality

through a graph. The three dimensional relationship among users, tags and web resources is firstly represented by a graph structure. A set of seed nodes, where each node represents a tag annotating a resource, is then selected and their quality is assessed. The quality of the remaining nodes is calculated by propagating the known quality of the seeds through the graph structure. We evaluate our approach on a public data set where tags generated by suspicious spammers were manually labelled. The experimental results demonstrate the effectiveness of this approach in measuring the quality of tags.