Ontology induction based on social annotations

This paper proposes an ontology induction approach to harvest the emergent semantics from the folksonomies which are built from the social annotations made by collaborative users. The authors leverage a latent subsumption hierarchy model to uncover the implicit structure of tag space. First, tag subsumptions are identified with a set-theoretical approach and model the tag space as a tag subsumption graph. Then, a tag generality ranking procedure is used to overcome the problem of inconsistent subsumptions. Finally, an agglomerative hierarchical clustering algorithm is utilized to generate the concept hierarchy. The authors conducted experiments on a dataset collected from a real-world system. Both qualitative and quantitative experimental results show a competitive performance of the proposed approach.