How the nature of web services drives vocabulary creation in social tagging

TL;DR

This paper investigates how the underlying nature of social tagging services influences vocabulary creation, revealing that it is not purely random and varies with user attitudes, which can inform new metrics for service characterization.

Contribution

It introduces a microscopic analysis of vocabulary creation, showing it deviates from random processes and depends on service type and user privacy attitudes.

Findings

Vocabulary creation does not follow a simple random process.

Differences in vocabulary creation relate to service type and user privacy attitudes.

Proposes a new index to identify the intrinsic nature of social tagging services.

Abstract

A social tagging system allows users to add arbitrary strings, called "tags", on a shared resource to organize and manage information. The Yule--Simon process, which has shown the ability to capture the population dynamics of social tagging behavior, does not handle the mechanism of new vocabulary creation because it assumes that new vocabulary creation is a Poisson-like random process. In this research, we focus on the mechanism of vocabulary creation from the microscopic perspective and discuss whether it also follows the random process assumed in the Yule--Simon process. To capture the microscopic mechanism of vocabulary creation, we focus on the relationship between the number of tags used in the same entry and the local vocabulary creation rate. We find that the relationship is not the result of a simple random process, and differs between services. Furthermore, these differences depend on whether the user's tagging attitudes are private or open. These results provide the potential for a new index to identify the service's intrinsic nature.