Abstract

Tagging facilitates information retrieval in social media and other online communities by allowing users to organize and describe online content. Researchers found that the efficiency of tagging systems steadily decreases over time, because tags become less precise in identifying specific documents, i.e., they lose their descriptiveness. However, previous works did not answer how or even whether community managers can improve the efficiency of tags. In this work, we use information-theoretic measures to track the descriptive and retrieval efficiency of tags on Stack Overflow, a question-answering system that strictly limits the number of tags users can specify per question. We observe that tagging efficiency stabilizes over time, while tag content and descriptiveness both increase. To explain this observation, we hypothesize that limiting the number of tags fosters novelty and diversity in tag usage, two properties …

Date

June 21, 2021

Authors

Tiago Santos, Keith Burghardt, Kristina Lerman, Denis Helic

Book

Proceedings of the 13th ACM Web Science Conference 2021

Pages

46-55