Towards automatic extraction of event and place semantics from flickr tags

TLDR

The study focuses on extracting place and event semantics from Flickr tags, leveraging the platform’s time and location metadata. The authors aim to develop a method that extracts semantic information from tags by analyzing their usage patterns. They evaluate two burst‑analysis techniques and introduce a novel Scale‑structure Identification method to analyze tag usage patterns. The Scale‑structure Identification method outperforms existing techniques and can be applied to other geo‑annotated domains.

Abstract

We describe an approach for extracting semantics of tags, unstructured text-labels assigned to resources on the Web, based on each tag's usage patterns. In particular, we focus on the problem of extracting place and event semantics for tags that are assigned to photos on Flickr, a popular photo sharing website that supports time and location (latitude/longitude) metadata. We analyze two methods inspired by well-known burst-analysis techniques and one novel method: Scale-structure Identification. We evaluate the methods on a subset of Flickr data, and show that our Scale-structure Identification method outperforms the existing techniques. The approach and methods described in this work can be used in other domains such as geo-annotated web pages, where text terms can be extracted and associated with usage patterns.