Piloted Search and Recommendation with Social Tag Cloud-Based Navigation Cédric Mesnage Mark Carman Faculty of Informatics Faculty of Informatics University of Lugano University of Lugano
[email protected] [email protected] ABSTRACT We investigate the generation of tag clouds using Bayesian models and test the hypothesis that social network informa- tion is better than overall popularity for ranking new and relevant information. We propose three tag cloud genera- tion models based on popularity, topics and social structure. We conducted two user evaluations to compare the models for search and recommendation of music with social net- work data gathered from ”Last.fm”. Our survey shows that search with tag clouds is not practical whereas recommenda- tion is promising. We report statistical results and compare the performance of the models in generating tag clouds that lead users to discover songs that they liked and were new to them. We find statistically significant evidence at 5% confi- dence level that the topic and social models outperform the popular model. Figure 1: Searching task. 1. INTRODUCTION using both social network and topic modeling based ap- We investigate mechanisms to explore social network in- proaches, that we have implemented in our prototype tag formation. Our current focus is to use contextual tag clouds cloud-based navigation system. We then describe the data as a mean to navigate through the data and control a rec- we have collected from the ”Last.fm” online music social net- ommendation system. work, and the evaluation consisting of a pilot user-study, a Figure 1 shows the screen of the Web application we de- user survey and a follow up study.