Modeling Flickr Communities Through Probabilistic Topic-Based Analysis

Abstract--With the increased presence of digital imaging devices, there also came an explosion in the amount of multimedia content available online. Users have transformed from passive consumers of media into content creators and have started organizing themselves in and around online communities. Flickr has more than 30 million users and over 3 billion photos, and many of them are tagged and public. One very important aspect in Flickr is the ability of users to organize in self-managed communities called groups. This paper examines an unexplored problem, which is jointly analyzing Flickr groups and users. We show that although users and groups are conceptually different, in practice they can be represented in a similar way via a bag-of-tags derived from their photos, which is amenable for probabilistic topic modeling. We then propose a probabilistic topic model representation learned in an unsupervised manner that allows the discovery of similar users and groups beyond direct tag-base...

• Type: Journal
• Year: 2010
• Where: TMM
• Authors: Radu Andrei Negoescu, Daniel Gatica-Perez
• Keywords: Flickr, Flickr Groups, Management, TMM 2010, Topic-based Representation