Explorations in tag suggestion and query expansion

ABSTRACT

The query used in a search system is only an approximation to the user's true information need, and as a result, many factors can reduce the quality of search results. One is query ambiguity, causing searchers with different needs to issue the same query. For example, for the query java, some users may want to find java tutorial while others may want to download java software. Other factors include a vocabulary mismatch and a lack of knowledge regarding the contents of the document collection. In any case, many users benefit from assistance in forming a good query. As a result, some commercial services provide query suggestions for many queries.

In this paper, we propose a Tag Suggestion System that takes advantage of tags associated with query results to expand a searcher's query. Since not every web page is associated with existing tags, we first build an auto-tagging system which can assign multiple tags to web pages, including news, blogs, etc. The current system contains the most popular 140 tags in del.icio.us, with high precision performance.

A small user study is performed to evaluate anecdotally the performance of our Tag Suggestion System, showing better quality than the query suggestion mechanisms provided by Yahoo! and Google. The result pages of expanded queries generated by the Tag Suggestion System are also significantly better than those of the Google original system.

REFERENCES

• 1: Google soap search api reference. http://code.google.com/apis/soapsearch/reference.html.
• 2: Smart information retrieval system. ftp://ftp.cs.cornell.edu/pub/smart/english.stop.
• 3: Bodo Billerbeck , Justin Zobel, Efficient query expansion with auxiliary data structures, Information Systems, v.31 n.7, p.573-584, November 2006 [doi>10.1016/j.is.2005.11.002]
• 4: Christopher H. Brooks , Nancy Montanez, Improved annotation of the blogosphere via autotagging and hierarchical clustering, Proceedings of the 15th international conference on World Wide Web, May 23-26, 2006, Edinburgh, Scotland [doi>10.1145/1135777.1135869]
• 5: Paul - Alexandru Chirita , Claudiu S. Firan , Wolfgang Nejdl, Personalized query expansion for the web, Proceedings of the 30th annual international ACM SIGIR conference on Research and development in information retrieval, July 23-27, 2007, Amsterdam, The Netherlands [doi>10.1145/1277741.1277746]
• 6: Silviu Cucerzan , Ryen W. White, Query suggestion based on user landing pages, Proceedings of the 30th annual international ACM SIGIR conference on Research and development in information retrieval, July 23-27, 2007, Amsterdam, The Netherlands [doi>10.1145/1277741.1277953]
• 7: Shigeru Fujimura , KO Fujimura , Hidenori Okuda, Blogosonomy: Autotagging Any Text Using Bloggers' Knowledge, Proceedings of the IEEE/WIC/ACM International Conference on Web Intelligence, p.205-212, November 02-05, 2007 [doi>10.1109/WI.2007.31]
• 8: Paul Heymann , Daniel Ramage , Hector Garcia-Molina, Social tag prediction, Proceedings of the 31st annual international ACM SIGIR conference on Research and development in information retrieval, July 20-24, 2008, Singapore, Singapore [doi>10.1145/1390334.1390425]
• 9: M. Hirabayashi. Hyper estraier: a full-text search system for communities. http://hyperestraier.sourceforge.net/index.html..
• 10: Sigma On Kee Lee , Andy Hon Wai Chun, Automatic tag recommendation for the web 2.0 blogosphere using collaborative tagging and hybrid ANN semantic structures, Proceedings of the 6th Conference on WSEAS International Conference on Applied Computer Science, p.88-93, April 15-17, 2007, Hangzhou, China
• 11: A. K. McCallum. Bow: A toolkit for statistical language modeling,text retrieval,classification and clustering.http://www.cs.cmu.edu/mccallum/bow, 1996.
• 12: Gilad Mishne, AutoTag: a collaborative approach to automated tag assignment for weblog posts, Proceedings of the 15th international conference on World Wide Web, May 23-26, 2006, Edinburgh, Scotland [doi>10.1145/1135777.1135961]
• 13: Yang Song , Ziming Zhuang , Huajing Li , Qiankun Zhao , Jia Li , Wang-Chien Lee , C. Lee Giles, Real-time automatic tag recommendation, Proceedings of the 31st annual international ACM SIGIR conference on Research and development in information retrieval, July 20-24, 2008, Singapore, Singapore [doi>10.1145/1390334.1390423]
• 14: S. Sood, S. Owsley, K. Hammond, and L. Birnbaum. Tagassist: Automatic tag suggestion for blog posts. ICWSM, 2007.

INDEX TERMS

Primary Classification:
  H. Information Systems
  H.3 INFORMATION STORAGE AND RETRIEVAL
      H.3.3 Information Search and Retrieval

General Terms:
Algorithms, Design, Experimentation

Keywords:
query expansion, tag suggestion