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ACM Hypertext 2012 – Call for Workshop Proposals

ACM Hypertext 2012 will be running workshops and tutorials, taking place on June 25th, the day before the start of the main conference. The purpose of the workshops is to provide a more informal setting where participants can exchange ideas on a focused topic and suggest directions for future research. As such, they also offer a good opportunity for researchers to present their work and to obtain feedback from an interested community.

Acceptance of workshop proposals will be based on the experience and background of the organizers in the topic, and on the relevance of the subject matter with regard to the topics addressed in the main conference.

The deadline for submitting proposals will be January 10, 2012January 24, 2012.

Submission of Proposals

Proposals for Workshops should include the following elements:

  • Title and acronym;
  • Name(s), affiliation(s), mailing address(es) and e-mail address(es) of the proposers;
  • A description of the topic and motivation of the workshop (not exceeding 500 words);
  • A short description of the target audience;
  • A first version of the Call for Papers;
  • Type of the workshop (full-day or half-day);
  • Arrangements for the organization of the workshop, including a brief outline of the workshop describing anticipated format, possible session names, invited talks, panels, demos;
  • A short description on how the workshop will be advertised so as to ensure a sufficiently wide range of authors and high quality papers along with an estimation of the number of participants;
  • Names, addresses, and home page links of people who have agreed to be part of the program committee of the workshop;
  • A brief description of the experience and background of the organizers in the topic, and links to homepages of the workshop chairs.

The organizers are encouraged to provide the following additional information:

  • A preliminary list of reviewers
  • A list of potential authors
  • A list of potential attendees

Proposals should be submitted electronically as a single PDF file to the workshop chairs:

Key dates:

  • January 10, 2012January 24, 2012: Workshop/Tutorial submissions due
  • January 17, 2012January 30, 2012: Notification to proposers
  • January 25, 2012February 6, 2012: The organizers of each workshop send out the Call for Papers
  • June 25, 2012: Workshop day

Organization of Workshops

After the acceptance of a workshop proposal the organizer(s) should:

  • Create and distribute a Call for Papers and a Call for Participation;
  • Create a Web page for the workshop, the link of which will be published on the Conference Web site;
  • Create a Program Committee;
  • Review and select contributions to be included in the workshop proceedings (at least 2 reviewers for each paper);
  • Schedule and coordinate the workshop activities.
  • Put together accepted papers into electronic workshop proceedings and make them available online.

For details, please visit: http://www.ht2012.org/

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Classifying Trending Topics: A Typology of Conversation Triggers on Twitter

My paper with Damiano Spina, Víctor Fresno and Raquel Martínez entitled “Classifying Trending Topics: A Typology of Conversation Triggers on Twitter” has been accepted for publication and presentation at CIKM 2011, 20th ACM Conference on Information and Knowledge Management to be held in Glasgow, Scotland, from October 24 to 28, 2011.

Abstract

Twitter summarizes the great deal of messages posted by users in the form of trending topics that reflect the top conversations being discussed at a given moment. These trending topics tend to be connected to current affairs. Different happenings can give rise to the emergence of these trending topics. For instance, a sports event broadcasted on TV, or a viral meme introduced by a community of users. Detecting the type of origin can facilitate information filtering, enhance real-time data processing, and improve user experience. In this paper, we introduce a typology to categorize the triggers that leverage trending topics: news, current events, memes, and commemoratives. We define a set of straightforward language-independent features that rely on the social spread of the trends to discriminate among those types of trending topics. Our method provides an efficient way to immediately and accurately categorize trending topics without need of external data, outperforming a content-based approach.

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Tags vs Shelves: From Social Tagging to Social Classification

My paper with Christian Körner and Markus Strohmaier entitled “Tags vs Shelves: From Social Tagging to Social Classification” has been accepted for publication and presentation at HT 2011, the 22nd ACM Conference on Hypertext and Hypermedia to be held in Eindhoven, Netherlands, from June 6 to 9, 2011.

Abstract

Recent research has shown that different tagging motivation and user behavior can effect the overall usefulness of social tagging systems for certain tasks. In this paper, we provide further evidence for this observation by demonstrating that tagging data obtained from certain types of users – so-called Categorizers – outperforms data from other users on a social classification task. We show that segmenting users based on their tagging behavior has significant impact on the performance of automated classification of tagged data by using (i) tagging data from two different social tagging systems, (ii) a Support Vector Machine as a classification mechanism and (iii) existing classification systems such as the Library of Congress Classification System as ground truth. Our results are relevant for scientists studying pragmatics and semantics of social tagging systems as well as for engineers interested in influencing emerging properties of deployed social tagging systems.

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Yahoo! announced they’re shutting down Delicious

Bad news from Yahoo!.. it’s now trending on Twitter: Yahoo! decided to shut down the social bookmarking site par excellence, Delicious. Even though we didn’t get any official announcement from Yahoo!, Techcrunch has confirmed the news with a response they got from Yahoo!:

Part of our organizational streamlining involves cutting our investment in underperforming or off-strategy products to put better focus on our core strengths and fund new innovation in the next year and beyond.

We continuously evaluate and prioritize our portfolio of products and services, and do plan to shut down some products in the coming months such as Yahoo! Buzz, our Traffic APIs, and others. We will communicate specific plans when appropriate.

Hopefully, someone will keep Delicious alive as MerchantCircle did with Bloglines. Let’s see how this turns out..

Update: Delicious announced that they’re not closing down the social bookmarking site, and they’ll look for a new home for it outside Yahoo.

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Suggesting tags is not always a good idea

When we are tagging a resource on a social tagging system, it could save us work by suggesting us tags for that resource. Therefore, we can choose the tags we consider relevant or representative for us. This tag suggestion can be performed in several ways, e.g., by suggesting tags that other users have annotated earlier for the same resource, or by using machine learning techniques to look for suitable tags.

Amongst others, Amazon uses the latter approach to suggest tags when nobody has annotated a book yet. In this case, we can see a subsection “Suggested Tags from Similar Products” for that book. Nonetheless, this doesn’t seem to be a good approach, and it sometimes suggests us weird tags, as happens for O’Reilly’s book “Cassandra: The Definitive Guide” [retrieved on November 3, 2010]:

Cassandra: The Definitive Guide on Amazon

As stated by Delicious founder Joshua Schachter:

Automatic tags lose a lot – doesn’t help the user really achieve their goals. That’s why the ‘add to del.icio.us’ badges don’t let you suggest tags.

Well, I think we should pay attention to Schachter’s quote, and let the users tag by themselves, without suggesting them automatic tags.

More posts will come soon on tag suggestions.

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A glossary of terms related to social tagging

There are many terms related to –and many times created because of– the social tagging phenomenon. The following is a list of terms that are relevant to social tagging. This list may become larger throughout time. I’ll try to add new terms to it, but I’ll also appreciate your contribution to expand it. Feel free to contact me or leave a comment in this blog post for any proposal you have.

These are the terms I have collected so far:

Tagging & Social Tagging

Tagging: Tagging is an open way to assign tags or keywords to resources or items (e.g., web pages, movies or books), in order to describe them. This enables the later retrieval of the resources in an easier way, using tags as resource metadata. As opposed to a classical taxonomy-based categorization system, they are usually non-hierarchical, and the vocabulary is open, so it tends to grow indefinitely. For instance, a user could tag this blog as social-tagging, research and blog, whereas another user could use web2.0, social-bookmarking and tagging tags to annotate it.

Social tagging: A tagging system becomes social when its tag annotations are publicly visible, and so profitable for anyone. The fact of a tagging system being social implies that a user could take advantage of tags defined by others to retrieve a resource.

Tag cloud: In order to enable visual browsing, social tagging tools typically provide an interface model known as tag cloud. When users access the information in these structures, it is presented in the form of a cloud consisting of the most popular tags, where the larger is the font size of a tag, the more popular it is on the site. Typical tag clouds have between 50 and 200 tags, and tag weights are represented using font sizes or other visual clues. In addition, tags can be sorted in alphabetical, size-based or random order, and users can usually customize clouds with different fonts, layouts, and color schemes. These structures are particularly useful for browsing or information discovery, because they provide a visual summary of the content in the collection. More information on Wikipedia: Tag cloud.

Social Bookmarking & Social Cataloging

Social bookmarking: Delicious, StumbleUpon and Diigo, amongst others, are known as social bookmarking sites. They provide a social means to save web pages (or other online resources like images or videos) as bookmarks, in order to retrieve them later on. In contrast to saving bookmarks in user’s local browser, posting them to social bookmarking sites allows the community to discover others’ links and, besides, to access the bookmarks from any computer to the user itself. In these systems, bookmarks represent references to web resources, and do not attach a copy of them, but just a link. Note that social bookmarking sites do not always rely on social tags to organize resources, e.g., Reddit is a social bookmarking approach to add comments on web pages instead of tags. The use of social tags in social bookmarking systems is a common approach, though. For more information, see: Social bookmarking and List of social bookmarking sites on Wikipedia.

Social cataloging: They are quite similar to social bookmarking sites in that resources are socially shared but, in this case, offline resources like music, books or movies are saved. For instance, LibraryThing allows to save the books you like, Hulu does it for movies and TV series, and Last.fm for music-related resources. As in social bookmarking sites, tags are the most common way to annotate resources in social cataloging sites.

Folksonomy & Personomy

Folksonomy: As a result of a community tagging resources, the collection of tags defined by them creates a tag-based organization, so-called folksonomy. A folksonomy is also known as a community-based taxonomy, where the classification scheme is plain, there are no predefined tags, and therefore users can freely choose new words as tags. A folksonomy is basically known as weighted set of tags, and may refer to a whole collection/site, a resource or a user. A summary of a folksonomy is usually presented in the form of a tag cloud.

Personomy: Personomy is a neologism created from the term folksonomy, and it refers to the weighted set of tags of a single user/person. It summarizes the topics a user tags about.

Simple Tagging & Collaborative Tagging

To the best of my knowledge, these two terms were first coined by Gene Smith, in the book Tagging: People-Powered Metadata for the Social Web. Previously, Thomas Vander Wal referred to them as Narrow Folksonomy and Broad Folksonomy.

Simple tagging: users describe their own resources or items, such as photos on Flickr, news on Digg or videos on Youtube, but nobody else tags another user’s resources. Usually, the author of the resource is who tags it. This means no more than one user tags an item. In many cases, like in Flickr and Youtube, simple tagging systems include an attachment to the resource, and not just a reference to it.

Collaborative tagging: many users tag the same item, and every person can tag it with their own tags in their own vocabulary. The collection of tags assigned by a single user creates a smaller folksonomy, also known as personomy. As a result, several users tend to post the same item. For instance, CiteULike, LibraryThing and Delicious are based on collaborative tagging, where each resource (papers, books and URLs, respectively) could be tagged (therefore annotated) by all the users who considered it interesting.

For more information on simple and collaborative tagging, see my previous post: What are social tags?

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A Call for Social Tagging Datasets

Christian Körner and Markus Strohmaier, from the Graz University of Technology, in Austria, have published an article on social tagging datasets in the latest issue of the ACM SIGWEB Newsletter. Existing social tagging datasets have been listed there, including our 3 datasets: DeliciousT140, Wiki10+ and Social-ODP-2k9.

Have a look at it!

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Wiki10+: a Wikipedia-based social tagging dataset

Wiki10+, a dataset with 20,764 annotated English Wikipedia articles is now available for download. This dataset includes that many Wikipedia articles, with their corresponding social tags retrieved from Delicious.

The dataset, including both articles’ content and social tags, can be downloaded from here.

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TaggedWiki: A prototype on tags over Wikipedia

I have recently prepared a prototype based on Wikipedia, integrating a tagging system on it. I did it for my presentation at Wikimania 2009, entitled “Enhancing Navigation on Wikipedia with Social Tags”. This prototype allows us to evaluate whether a social tagging system would improve and enhance article navigation and search on Wikipedia. Visit the prototype.

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Enhancing Navigation on Wikipedia with Social Tags (slides)

If you are interested in my presentation about “Enhancing Navigation on Wikipedia with Social Tags”, in Wikimania 2009, you can download the slides using the following links:

English

Spanish

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