A Probabilistic Approach for Learning Folksonomies from Structured Data

Learning structured representations has emerged as an important problem in many domains, including document and Web data mining, bioinformatics, and image analysis. One approach to learning complex structures is to integrate many smaller, incomplete and noisy structure fragments. In this work, we present an unsupervised probabilistic approach that extends affinity propagation [7] to combine the small ontological fragments into a collection of integrated, consistent, and larger folksonomies. This is a challenging task because the method must aggregate similar structures while avoiding structural inconsistencies and handling noise. We validate the approach on a real-world social media dataset, comprised of shallow personal hierarchies specified by many individual users, collected from the photosharing website Flickr. Our empirical results show that our proposed approach is able to construct deeper and denser structures, compared to an approach using only the standard affinity propagati...

• Type: Journal
• Year: 2010
• Where: CORR
• Authors: Anon Plangprasopchok, Kristina Lerman, Lise Getoor
• Keywords: Affinity Propagation, CORR 2010, Data Mining, Education, Unsupervised Probabilistic Approach