Clustering algorithms for tags

With the development and application of social media, more and more user-generated contents are created. Tag data, a kind of typical user generated content, has attracted lots of interests of researchers. In general, tags are the freely chosen textual descriptions by users to label digital data sources in social tagging systems. Poor retrieval performance remains a major problem of most social tagging systems resulting from the severe difficulty of ambiguity, redundancy, and less semantic nature of tags. Clustering method is a useful tool to increase the ability of information retrieval in the aforementioned systems. In this chapter, the authors (1) review the background of state-of-the-art tagging clustering and the tag data description, (2) present five kinds of tag similarity measurements proposed by researchers, and (3) finally propose a new clustering algorithm for tags based on local information that is derived from Kernel function. This chapter aims to benefit both academic and industry communities who are interested in the techniques and applications of tagging clustering. Copyright © 2013 IGI Global.