Many social Web sites allow users to publish content and annotate with descriptive metadata. In addition to flat tags, some social Web sites have recently began to allow users to organize their content and metadata hierarchically. The social photosharing site Flickr, for example, allows users to group related photos in sets, and related sets in collections. The social bookmarking site Del.icio.us similarly lets users group related tags into bundles. Although the sites themselves don't impose any constraints on how these hierarchies are used, individuals generally use them to capture relationships between concepts, most commonly the broader narrower relations. Collective annotation of content with hierarchical relations may lead to an emergent classification system, called a folksonomy. While some researchers have explored using tags as evidence for learning folksonomies, we believe that hierarchical relations described above offer a high-quality source of evidence for this task. We propose a simple approach to aggregate shallow hierarchies created by many distinct Flickr users into a common folksonomy. Our approach uses statistics to determine if a particular relation should be retained or discarded. The relations are then woven together into larger hierarchies. Although we have not carried out a detailed quantitative evaluation of the approach, it looks very promising since it generates very reasonable, non-trivial hierarchies.
There is another line of research that focuses on exploiting partial hierarchies contributed by users. project @cite_6 collects bookmarks donated by users. Each bookmark is organized in a tree structure as folder and sub folders by an individual user. Based on tree structures, similarities between URLs are computed and used for URL recommendation and ranking. Although this project does not concentrate on conceptual hierarchy construction, it provides a good motivation to exploit explicit partial structures like folder and subfolder relations. Our approach is in the same spirit as --- we exploit collection and set relations contributed by users on a social Web site to construct conceptual hierarchies. We hypothesize that generality-popularity problem of keywords in collection-set relation space is less than that in tag space. Although people may use a keyword Washington'' far more than United States'' to name their collections and sets, not so many people would put their United States'' album into Washington'' super album, however.
@cite_6
2663075978 190320872 2034953016 2153419563
In this paper, we present the results of a user study on exploratory search activities in a social science digital library. We conducted a user study with 32 participants with a social sciences background—16 postdoctoral researchers and 16 students—who were asked to solve a task on searching related work to a given topic. The exploratory search task was performed in a 10-min time slot. The use of certain search activities is measured and compared to gaze data recorded with an eye tracking device. We use a novel tree graph representation to visualise the users’ search patterns and introduce a way to combine multiple search session trees. The tree graph representation is capable of creating one single tree for multiple users and identifying common search patterns. In addition, the information behaviour of students and postdoctoral researchers is being compared. The results show that search activities on the stratagem level are frequently utilised by both user groups. The most heavily used search activities were keyword search, followed by browsing through references and citations, and author searching. The eye tracking results showed an intense examination of documents metadata, especially on the level of citations and references. When comparing the group of students and postdoctoral researchers, we found significant differences regarding gaze data on the area of the journal name of the seed document. In general, we found a tendency of the postdoctoral researchers to examine the metadata records more intensively with regard to dwell time and the number of fixations. By creating combined session trees and deriving subtrees from those, we were able to identify common patterns like economic (explorative) and exhaustive (navigational) behaviour. Our results show that participants utilised multiple search strategies starting from the seed document, which means that they examined different paths to find related publications. This paper presents work in progress on a new technique for visu- alising and manipulating large hierarchies. The information slices approach compactly visualises hierarchical structures using a series of semi-circular discs. The technique is described in the context of our early experience with a prototype file system visualiser based on information slices. Over the last few years, the emerging field of information visuali- sation has resulted in a numerous techniques for helping visualise and make sense of large information spaces (10). Among these are several techniques for visualising and interacting with large hierar- chies which go beyond the traditional approach taken in 2d scrolling browsers such as the Windows Explorer. Treemaps (6, 9) are space-filling visualisations of hierarchies based on successive horizontal and vertical subdivision of screen rectangles. The area of each rectangle is proportional to some at- tribute of the underlying hierarchy such as the (total) size of each subtree. Xdu (4) is a utility for the X window system which displays a graphical disk usage for Unix file systems. Rectangles are stacked from left to right as the directory tree is descended. The current di- rectory is represented by the leftmost rectangle, which is the entire height of the window. Subdirectories are represented by neighbour- ing rectangles in the next column, whose height are proportional to the size of each subdirectory. The hyperbolic browser (7) uses a focus and context technique based on hyperbolic geometry. A hierarchy is laid out uniformly on the hyperbolic plane and then mapped to the unit disc for display on screen. Nodes in the centre of the disc are largest and nodes are assigned progressively less space towards the perimeter of the disc. Cheops (3) is based on multiple re-use of overlaid triangles in the display. Working top-down, the selection of a node (triangle) at a particular level designates that node's children are to be represented Abstract : This paper presents a means of automatically deriving a hierarchical organization of concepts from a set of documents without use of training data or standard clustering techniques. Instead, salient words and phrases extracted from the documents are organized hierarchically using a type of co-occurrence known as subsumption. The resulting structure is displayed as a series of hierarchical menus. When generated from a set of retrieved documents, a user browsing the menus is provided with a detailed overview of their content in a manner distinct from existing overview and summarization techniques. The methods used to build the structure are simple, but appear to be effective: a smallscale user study reveals that the generated hierarchy possesses properties expected of such a structure in that general terms are placed at the top levels leading to related and more specific terms below. The formation and presentation of the hierarchy is described along with the user study and some other informal evaluations. The organization of a set of documents into a concept hierarchy derived automatically from the set itself is undoubtedly one goal of information retrieval. Were this goal to be achieved, the documents would be organized into a form somewhat like existing manually constructed subject hierarchies, such as the Library of Congress categories, or the Dewey Decimal system. The only difference being that the categories would be customized to the set of documents itself. For example, from a collection of media related articles, the category "Entertainment" might appear near the top level; below it, (amongst others) one might find the category "Movies", a type of entertainment; and below that, there could be the category "Actors & Actresses", an aspect of movies. As can be seen, the arrangement of the categories provides an overview of the topic structure of those articles. We introduce an approach to learn discriminative visual representations while exploiting external semantic knowledge about object category relationships. Given a hierarchical taxonomy that captures semantic similarity between the objects, we learn a corresponding tree of metrics (ToM). In this tree, we have one metric for each non-leaf node of the object hierarchy, and each metric is responsible for discriminating among its immediate subcategory children. Specifically, a Mahalanobis metric learned for a given node must satisfy the appropriate (dis)similarity constraints generated only among its subtree members' training instances. To further exploit the semantics, we introduce a novel regularizer coupling the metrics that prefers a sparse disjoint set of features to be selected for each metric relative to its ancestor (supercategory) nodes' metrics. Intuitively, this reflects that visual cues most useful to distinguish the generic classes (e.g., feline vs. canine) should be different than those cues most useful to distinguish their component fine-grained classes (e.g., Persian cat vs. Siamese cat). We validate our approach with multiple image datasets using the WordNet taxonomy, show its advantages over alternative metric learning approaches, and analyze the meaning of attribute features selected by our algorithm.