Identifying User Interests in Folksonomies

This paper proposes a probabilistic method for classifying folksonomy users to specific domains and for identifying their specific interests to these domains. The proposed method uses a hierarchical probabilistic topic modeling approach that exploits tags to induce hierarchies of latent topics. These hierarchies represent domain conceptualizations of specific domains that are either collective or user-specific. We propose two alternative methods that exploit the induced hierarchies for classifying and identifying users’ interests to specific domains and provide preliminary evaluation results.