Refereed Papers

Track: Social Networks: Applications and Infrastructures for Web 2.0

Paper Title:
Exploring Social Annotations for Information Retrieval

Authors:

• Ding Zhou(Facebook Inc.)
• Jiang Bian(Georgia Institute of Technology)
• Shuyi Zheng(The Pennsylvania State University)
• Hongyuan Zha(Georgia Institute of Technology)
• C. Lee Giles(The Pennsylvania State University)

Abstract:
Social annotation has gained increasing popularity in many Web-based applications, leading to an emerging research area in text analysis and information retrieval. This paper is concerned with developing probabilistic models and computational algorithms for social annotations. We propose a unified framework to combine the modeling of social annotations with the language modeling-based methods for information retrieval. The proposed approach consists of two steps: (1) discovering topics in the contents and annotations of documents while categorizing the users by domains; and (2) enhancing document and query language models by incorporating user domain interests as well as topical background models. Differences in user domain expertise are also considered when combining the discovered user domain interests. In particular, we propose a new general generative model for social annotations, which is then simplified to a computationally tractable hierarchical Bayesian network. Then we apply smoothing techniques in a risk minimization framework to incorporate the topical information to language models. Experiments are carried out on a real-world annotation data set sampled from del.icio.us. Our results demonstrate significant improvements over the alternative approaches without consideration of topical information, social annotations, user expertise, or simple incorporation of topic analysis.

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