Tag Sense Disambiguation for Clarifying the Vocabulary of Social Tags

Tagging is one of the most popular services in Web 2.0. As a special form of tagging, social tagging is done collaboratively by many users, which forms a so-called folksonomy. As tagging has become widespread on the Web, the tag vocabulary is now very informal, uncontrolled, and personalized. For this reason, many tags are unfamiliar and ambiguous to users so that they fail to understand the meaning of each tag. In this paper, we propose a tag sense disambiguating method, called tag sense disambiguation (TSD), which works in the social tagging environment. TSD can be applied to the vocabulary of social tags, thereby enabling users to understand the meaning of each tag through Wikipedia. To find the correct mappings from del.icio.us tags to Wikipedia articles, we define the local neighbor tags, the global neighbor tags, and finally the neighbor tags that would be the useful key-words for disambiguating the sense of each tag based on the tag co-occurrences. The automatically built mappings are reasonable in most cases. The experiment shows that TSD can find the correct mappings with high accuracy.