Efficient Tag Recommendation for Real-Life Data

Abstract

Despite all of the advantages of tags as an easy and flexible information management approach, tagging is a cumbersome task. A set of descriptive tags has to be manually entered by users whenever they post a resource. This process can be simplified by the use of tag recommendation systems. Their objective is to suggest potentially useful tags to the user. We present a hybrid tag recommendation system together with a scalable, highly efficient system architecture. The system is able to utilize user feedback to tune its parameters to specific characteristics of the underlying tagging system and adapt the recommendation models to newly added content. The evaluation of the system on six real-life datasets demonstrated the system’s ability to combine tags from various sources (e.g., resource content or tags previously used by the user) to achieve the best quality of recommended tags. It also confirmed the importance of parameter tuning and content adaptation. A series of additional experiments allowed us to better understand the characteristics of the system and tagging datasets and to determine the potential areas for further system development.