The Wisdom of the Few? “Supertaggers†in Collaborative Tagging Systems

Authors

  • Jared Lorince Indiana University
  • Sam Zorowitz Massachusetts General Hospital and Harvard Medical School
  • Jaimie Murdock Indiana University
  • Peter M. Todd Indiana University

DOI:

https://doi.org/10.1561/106.00000002

Abstract

A folksonomy is ostensibly an information structure built up by the “wisdom of the crowdâ€, but is the “crowd†really doing the work? Tagging is in fact a sharply skewed process in which a small minority of “supertagger†users generate an overwhelming majority of the annotations. Using data from three large-scale social tagging platforms, we explore (a) how to best quantify the imbalance in tagging behavior and formally define a supertagger, (b) how supertaggers differ from other users in their tagging patterns, and (c) if effects of motivation and expertise inform our understanding of what makes a supertagger. Our results indicate that such prolific users not only tag more than their counterparts, but in quantifiably different ways. Specifically, we find that supertaggers are more likely to label content in the long tail of less popular items, that they show differences in patterns of content tagged and terms utilized, and are measurably different with respect to tagging expertise and motivation. These findings suggest we should question the extent to which folksonomies achieve crowdsourced classification via the “wisdom of the crowdâ€, especially for broad folksonomies like Last.fm as opposed to narrow folksonomies like Flickr. 

References

Ames, M. and M. Naaman (2007), ‘Why we tag: motivations for annotation in mobile and online media’. In: Proceedings of the SIGCHI conference on Human factors in computing systems. p. 971–980, ACM.

Cattuto, C., A. Baldassarri, V. D. Servedio, and V. Loreto (2007), ‘Vocabulary growth in collaborative tagging systems’. arXiv Preprint.

Figueiredo, F., H. Pinto, F. Belém, J. Almeida, M. Gonçalves, D. Fernandes, and E. Moura (2013), ‘Assessing the quality of textual features in social media’. 49(1), 222–247.

Fu, W.-T. and W. Dong (2010), ‘Facilitating knowledge exploration in folksonomies: expertise ranking by link and semantic structures’. In: Social Computing (SocialCom), 2010 IEEE Second International Conference on. pp. 459– 464, IEEE.

Golder, S. A. and B. A. Huberman (2006), ‘Usage patterns of collaborative tagging systems’. Journal of information science 32(2), 198–208.

Görlitz, O., S. Sizov, and S. Staab (2008), ‘PINTS: Peer-to- Peer Infrastructure for Tagging Systems.’. In: Proceedings of the Seventh International Workshop on Peer-to-Peer Systems (IPTPS). p. 19.

Heckner, M., M. Heilemann, and C. Wolff (2009), ‘Personal Information Management vs. Resource Sharing: Towards a Model of Information Behavior in Social Tagging Systems’. In: Proceedings of the Third International Conference on Weblogs and Social Media (ICWSM).

Hotho, A., R. Jäschke, C. Schmitz, and G. Stumme (2006), ‘BibSonomy: A social bookmark and publication sharing system’. In: Proceedings of the Conceptual Structures Tool Interoperability Workshop at the 14th International Conference on Conceptual Structures. p. 87–102.

Kleinberg, J. M. (1999), ‘Authoritative sources in a hyperlinked environment’. Journal of the ACM (JACM) 46(5), 604–632.

Körner, C., D. Benz, A. Hotho, M. Strohmaier, and G. Stumme (2010a), ‘Stop thinking, start tagging: tag semantics emerge from collaborative verbosity’. In: Proceedings of the 19th international conference on World wide web. p. 521–530, ACM.

Körner, C., R. Kern, H.-P. Grahsl, and M. Strohmaier (2010b), ‘Of categorizers and describers: An evaluation of quantitative measures for tagging motivation’. In: Proceedings of the 21st ACM conference on hypertext and hypermedia. p. 157–166, ACM.

Kubek, M., J. Nützel, and F. Zimmermann (2010), ‘Automatic Taxonomy Extraction through Mining Social Networks’. In: Proceedings of the 8th International Workshop for Technical, Economic and Legal Aspects of Business Models for Virtual Goods incorporating the 6th International ODRL Workshop. Namur, Belgium.

Lorince, J. and P. M. Todd (2013), ‘Can simple social copying heuristics explain tag popularity in a collaborative tagging system?’. In: Proceedings of the 5th Annual ACM Web Sci- ence Conference. p. 215–224, ACM.

Lorince, J., S. Zorowitz, J. Murdock, and P. M. Todd (2014), ‘"Supertagger" behavior in building folksonomies’. In: Proceedings of the 6th Annual ACM Web Science Conference. pp. 129–138, ACM.

Marlow, C., M. Naaman, D. Boyd, and M. Davis (2006), ‘HT06, tagging paper, taxonomy, Flickr, academic article, to read’. In: Proceedings of the seventeenth conference on Hypertext and hypermedia. p. 31–40, ACM.

Newman, M. E. (2005), ‘Power laws, Pareto distributions and Zipf’s law’. Contemporary physics 46(5), 323–351.

Niepert, M., C. Buckner, and C. Allen (2007), ‘A dynamic ontology for a dynamic reference work’. In: Proceedings of the 7th ACM/IEEE-CS joint conference on Digital libraries. p. 288–297, ACM.

Nov, O., M. Naaman, and C. Ye (2008), ‘What drives content tagging: the case of photos on Flickr’. In: Proceedings of the SIGCHI conference on Human factors in computing systems. p. 1097–1100, ACM.

Nov, O. and C. Ye (2010), ‘Why do people tag?: motivations for photo tagging’. Communications of the ACM 53(7), 128–131.

Quintarelli, E. (2005), ‘Folksonomies: Power to the People’. In: Proceedings of the 1st International Society for Knowledge Organization (Italy) (ISKOI), UniMIB Meeting.

Robu, V., H. Halpin, and H. Shepherd (2009), ‘Emergence of consensus and shared vocabularies in collaborative tagging systems’. ACM Transactions on the Web (TWEB) 3(4), 14.

Rogers, T. T. and K. Patterson (2007), ‘Object categorization: Reversals and explanations of the basic-level advantage.’ Journal of Experimental Psychology: General 136(3), 451–469.

Rosch, E., C. B. Mervis, W. D. Gray, D. M. Johnson, and P. Boyes-Braem (1976), ‘Basic objects in natural categories’. Cognitive psychology 8(3), 382–439.

Sen, S., S. K. Lam, A. M. Rashid, D. Cosley, D. Frankowski, J. Osterhouse, F. M. Harper, and J. Riedl (2006), ‘Tagging, communities, vocabulary, evolution’. In: Proceedings of the 2006 20th anniversary conference on Computer supported cooperative work. p. 181–190, ACM.

Strohmaier, M., C. Körner, and R. Kern (2010), ‘Why do Users Tag? Detecting Users’ Motivation for Tagging in Social Tagging Systems.’. In: Proceedings of the Fourth International Conference on Weblogs and Social Media (ICWSM).

Tanaka, J. W. and M. Taylor (1991), ‘Object categories and expertise: Is the basic level in the eye of the beholder?’. Cognitive psychology 23(3), 457–482.

Vander Wal, T. (2005), ‘Explaining and Showing Broad and Narrow Folksonomies’.

Vander Wal, T. (2007), ‘Folksonomy Coinage and Definition’.

Wetzker, R., C. Zimmermann, and C. Bauckhage (2008), ‘Analyzing social bookmarking systems: A del.icio.us cook- book’. In: Proceedings of the ECAI 2008 Mining Social Data Workshop. p. 26–30.

Yeung, A., C. Man, M. Noll, N. Gibbins, C. Meinel, and N. Shadbolt (2009), ‘On measuring expertise in collaborative tagging systems’. In: Web Science Conference: Society On-Line.

Yeung, C.-m. A., M. G. Noll, N. Gibbins, C. Meinel, and N. Shadbolt (2011), ‘SPEAR: Spamming-Resistant Expertise Analysis and Ranking in Collaborative Tagging Systems’. Computational Intelligence 27(3), 458–488.

Zubiaga, A., C. Körner, and M. Strohmaier (2011), ‘Tags vs shelves: from social tagging to social classification’. In: Proceedings of the 22nd ACM conference on Hypertext and hy- permedia. p. 93–102, ACM.

Downloads

Published

2015-08-04

Issue

Vol. 1 (2015)

Section

Articles

License

The copyright of the published articles stays with the authors.