Tag Meaning Disambiguation through Analysis of Tripartite Structure of Folksonomies

Collaborative tagging systems are becoming very popular recently. Web users use freely-chosen tags to describe shared resources, resulting in a folksonomy One problem of folksonomies is that tags which appear in the same form may carry multiple meanings and represent different concepts. As this kind of tags are ambiguous, the precisions in both description and retrieval of the shared resources are reduced. We attempt to develop effective methods to disambiguate tags by studying the tripartite structure of folksonomies. This paper describes the network analysis techniques that we employ to discover clusters of nodes in networks and the algorithm for tag disambiguation. Experiments show that the method is very effective in performing the task.