Detecting synonyms in social tagging systems to improve content retrieval

Maarten Clements, Arjen P. de Vries, Marcel J. T. Reinders

Abstract: Collaborative tagging used in online social content systems is naturally characterized by many synonyms, causing low precision retrieval. We propose a mechanism based on user preference profiles to identify synonyms that can be used to retrieve more relevant documents by expanding the user's query. Using a popular online book catalog we discuss the effectiveness of our method over usual similarity based expansion methods.