Social Tagging in Query Expansion: A New Way for Personalized Web Search

Social networks and collaborative tagging systems are rapidly gaining popularity as primary means for sorting and sharing data: users tag their bookmarks in order to simplify information dissemination and later lookup. Social Bookmarking services are useful in two important respects: first, they can allow an individual to remember the visited URLs, and second, tags can be made by the community to guide users towards valuable content. In this paper we focus on the latter use: we present a novel approach for personalized web search using query expansion. We further extend the family of well-known co-occurence matrix technique models by using a new way of exploring social tagging services. Our approach shows its strength particularly in the case of disambiguation of word contexts. We show how to design and implement such a system in practice and conduct several experiments on a real web-dataset collected from Regione Lazio Portal. To the best of our knowledge this is the first study centered on using social bookmarking and tagging techniques for personalization of web search and its evaluation in a real-world scenario.