Interactive and Context-Aware Tag Spell Check and Correction

Collaborative content creation and annotation creates vast repositories of all sorts of media, and user-defined tags play a central role as they are a simple yet powerful tool for organizing, searching and exploring the available resources. We observe that when a user annotates a resource with a set of tags, those tags are introduced one at a time. Therefore, when the fourth tag is introduced, a knowledge represented by the previous three tags, i.e., the context in which the fourth tag is produced, is available and exploitable for generating potential correction of the current tag. This context, together with the "wisdom of the crowd" represented by the co-occurrences of tags in all the resources of the repository, can be exploited to provide interactive tag spell check and correction. We develop this idea in a framework, based on a weighted tag co-occurrence graph and on nodes relatedness measures defined on weighted neighborhoods. We test our proposal on a dataset coming from YouTube. The results show that our framework is effective as it outperforms two important baselines. We also show that it is efficient, thus enabling its use in modern tagging services. © 2012 ACM.