How Tagging Pragmatics Influence Tag Sense Discovery in Social Annotation Systems

The presence of emergent semantics in social annotation systems has been reported in numerous studies. Two important problems in this context are the induction of semantic relations among tags and the discovery of different senses of a given tag. While a number of approaches for discovering tag senses exist, little is known about which factors influence the discovery process. In this paper, we analyze the influence of user pragmatic factors. We divide taggers into different pragmatic distinctions. Based on these distinctions, we identify subsets of users whose annotations allow for a more precise and complete discovery of tag senses. Our results provide evidence for a link between tagging pragmatics and semantics and provide another argument for including pragmatic factors in semantic extraction methods. Our work is relevant for improving search, retrieval and browsing in social annotation systems, as well as for optimizing ontology learning algorithms based on tagging data.