Blog Classification Using Tags: An Empirical Study

With an exponential growth of Weblogs (or blogs), many blog directories have appeared to help users to locate topical blogs. As tags are commonly used to describe blogs, we study the effectiveness of tags in blog classification. Compared with titles and descriptions, our experiments, using 24,247 blogs, showed that tags could lead to better classification accuracy. It is interesting to observe that more tags did not necessarily lead to better classification accuracy. To better describe blogs, we have also proposed a tag expansion algorithm that assigns a blog more tags that are often co-occur with those already associated with the blog. Our experiments showed that tag expansion helped to improve the recall of blog classification with the price of precision degradation.