To read this content please select one of the options below:

Comparative analysis of book tags: a cross-lingual perspective

Chao Lu (Department of Information Management, Nanjing University of Science and Technology, Nanjing, China)
Chengzhi Zhang (Department of Information Management, Nanjing University of Science and Technology, Nanjing, China)
Daqing He (School of Information Sciences, University of Pittsburgh, Pittsburgh, Pennsylvania, USA)

The Electronic Library

ISSN: 0264-0473

Article publication date: 1 August 2016

473

Abstract

Purpose

In the era of social media, users all over the world annotate books with social tags to express their preferences and interests. The purpose of this paper is to explore different tagging behaviours by analysing the book tags in different languages.

Design/methodology/approach

This investigation collected nearly 56,000 tags of 1,200 books from one Chinese and two English online bookmarking systems; it combined content analysis and machine-processing methods to evaluate the similarities and differences between different tagging systems from a cross-lingual perspective. Jaccard’s coefficient was adopted to evaluate the similarity level.

Findings

The results show that the similarity between mono-lingual tags of the same books is higher than that of cross-lingual tags in different systems and the similarity between tags of books written for specialties is higher than that of books written for the general public.

Research limitations/implications

Those who have more in common annotate books with more similar tags. The similarity between users in tagging systems determines the similarity of the tag sets.

Practical implications

The results and conclusion of this study will benefit users’ cross-lingual information retrieval and cross-lingual book recommendation for online bookmarking systems.

Originality/value

This study may be one of the first to compare cross-lingual tags. Its methodology can be applied to tag comparison between any two languages. The insights of this study will help develop cross-lingual tagging systems and improve information retrieval.

Keywords

Acknowledgements

This work was supported in part by National Social Science Fund Project (No.14BTQ033), National Natural Science Foundation of China (No. 70903032), Project of the Education Ministry’s Humanities and Social Science (No. 13YJA870020), Major Projects of National Social Science Fund (13&ZD174) and the Fundamental Research Funds for the Central Universities (No. 30915011323). Thanks are due to Prof. Heting Chu, Dr Kun Huang and Dr Bikun Chen for their valuable suggestions on this study.

Citation

Lu, C., Zhang, C. and He, D. (2016), "Comparative analysis of book tags: a cross-lingual perspective", The Electronic Library, Vol. 34 No. 4, pp. 666-682. https://doi.org/10.1108/EL-03-2015-0042

Publisher

:

Emerald Group Publishing Limited

Copyright © 2016, Emerald Group Publishing Limited

Related articles