Finding similar pages in a social tagging repository

Alex Penev, Raymond K. Wong

Abstract: Social tagging describes a community of users labeling web content with tags. It is a simple activity that enriches our knowledge about resources on the web. For a computer to help users search the tagged repository, it must know when tags are good or bad. We describe TagScore, a scoring function that rates the goodness of tags. The tags and their ratings give us a succinct synopsis for a page. We `find similar' pages in Del.icio.us by comparing synopses. Our approach gives good correlation to the full cosine similarity but is hundreds of times faster.