Abstract
The free-form tags available from social bookmarking sites such as Delicious have been shown to be useful for a number of purposes and could serve as a cheap source of metadata about URLs on the web. Unfortunately recent years have seen a reduction in the popularity of such sites, however at the same time microblogging sites such as Twitter have exploded in popularity. On these sites users submit short messages (or “tweets”) about what they are currently reading, thinking and doing and often post URLs.
In this work we look into the similarity between top tags drawn from Delicious and high-frequency terms from tweets to ascertain whether Twitter data could serve as a useful replacement for Delicious. We investigate how these terms compare with web page content, whether or not top Twitter terms converge and determine if the terms are mostly descriptive (and therefore useful) or if they are mostly expressing sentiment or emotion. We discover that provided a large number of tweets are available referring to a chosen URL then the top terms drawn from these tweets are similar to Delicious tags and could therefore be used for similar purposes.
This is a preview of subscription content, log in via an institution.
Buying options
Tax calculation will be finalised at checkout
Purchases are for personal use only
Learn about institutional subscriptionsPreview
Unable to display preview. Download preview PDF.
References
Baccianella, S., Esuli, A., Sebastiani, F.: Sentiwordnet 3.0: An enhanced lexical resource for sentiment analysis and opinion mining. In: LREC 2010, p. 1 (2010)
Bao, S., Xue, G., Wu, X., Yu, Y., Fei, B., Su, Z.: Optimizing web search using social annotations. In: WWW 2007, New York, NY, USA, pp. 501–510 (2007)
Berners-Lee, T., Cailliau, R., Luotonen, A., Nielsen, H.F., Secret, A.: The world-wide web. Commun. ACM 37, 76–82 (1994)
James Carman, M., Baillie, M., Gwadera, R., Crestani, F.: A statistical comparison of tag and query logs, pp. 123–130 (2009)
eMarketer. US twitter usage surpasses earlier estimates
Golder, S., Huberman, B.: Usage patterns of collaborative tagging systems. Journal of Information Science 32(2), 198–208 (2006)
Golder, S., Huberman, B.A.: The structure of collaborative tagging systems. Journal of Information Science 32(2), 198–208 (2005)
Halpin, H., Robu, V., Shepherd, H.: The complex dynamics of collaborative tagging. In: WWW 2007, New York, NY, USA, pp. 211–220 (2007)
Harvey, M., Ruthven, I., Carman, M.J.: Improving social bookmark search using personalised latent variable language models. In: WSDM 2011, pp. 485–494 (2011)
Heymann, P., Koutrika, G., Garcia-Molina, G.: Can social bookmarking improve web search? In: WSDM 2008 (February 2008)
Huang, J., Thornton, K.M., Efthimiadis, E.N.: Conversational tagging in twitter. In: HT 2010, p. 173 (2010)
Hurlock, J., Wilson, M.L.: Searching twitter: Separating the tweet from the chaff. In: ICWSM (2011)
Java, A., Song, X., Finin, T., Tseng, B.: Why we twitter: understanding microblogging usage and communities. In: WebKDD/SNA-KDD 2007, pp. 56–65 (2007)
Manning, C.D., Schütze, H.: Foundations of statistical natural language processing. MIT Press, Cambridge (1999)
McFedries, P.: Technically speaking: All a-twitter. IEEE Spectrum 44, 84 (2007)
Morris, M.R., Panovich, K., Teevan, J.: What do people ask their social networks, and why? In: CHI 2010, pp. 1739–1748 (2010)
Author information
Authors and Affiliations
Editor information
Editors and Affiliations
Rights and permissions
Copyright information
© 2012 Springer-Verlag Berlin Heidelberg
About this paper
Cite this paper
Harvey, M., Carman, M., Elsweiler, D. (2012). Comparing Tweets and Tags for URLs. In: Baeza-Yates, R., et al. Advances in Information Retrieval. ECIR 2012. Lecture Notes in Computer Science, vol 7224. Springer, Berlin, Heidelberg. https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-642-28997-2_7
Download citation
DOI: https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-642-28997-2_7
Publisher Name: Springer, Berlin, Heidelberg
Print ISBN: 978-3-642-28996-5
Online ISBN: 978-3-642-28997-2
eBook Packages: Computer ScienceComputer Science (R0)