Folksonomy-based personalized search and ranking in social media services

In recent years, social Web users have been overwhelmed by the huge numbers of social media available. Consequentially, users have trouble finding social media suited to their needs. To help such users retrieve useful social media content, we propose a new model of tag-based personalized searches to enhance not only retrieval accuracy but also retrieval coverage. By leveraging social tagging as a preference indicator, we build two models: (i) a latent tag preference model that reflects how a certain user has assigned tags similar to a given tag and (ii) a latent tag annotation model that captures how users have tagged a certain tag to resources similar to a given resource. We then seamlessly map the tags onto items, depending on an individual user's query, to find the most desirable content relevant to the user's needs. Experimental results demonstrate that the proposed method significantly outperforms the state-of-the art algorithms and show our method's feasibility for personalized searches in social media services. (C) 2011 Elsevier Ltd. All rights reserved.