Ranking social bookmarks using topic models

Ranking of resources in social tagging systems is a difficult problem due to the inherent sparsity of the data and the vocabulary problems introduced by having a completely unrestricted lexicon. In this paper we propose to use hidden topic models as a principled way of reducing the dimensionality of this data to provide more accurate resource rankings with higher recall. We first describe Latent Dirichlet Allocation (LDA) and then show how it can be used to rank resources in a social bookmarking system. We test the LDA tagging model and compare it with 3 non-topic model baselines on a large data sample obtained from the Delicious social bookmarking site. Our evaluations show that our LDA-based method significantly outperforms all of the baselines.