Choosing Your Own Adventure:
Automatic Taxonomy Generation to Permit Many Paths

Xiaoguang Qi, Dawei Yin, Zhenzhen Xue and Brian D. Davison

Short Paper (4 pages)
Official ACM published version: http://dx.doi.org/10.1145/1871437.1871746
Author's version: PDF (251KB)

Abstract
A taxonomy organizes concepts or topics in a hierarchical structure and can be created manually or via automated systems. A major drawback of taxonomies is that they require users to have the same view of the topics as the taxonomy creator. Users who do not share that mental taxonomy are likely to have difficulty in finding the desired topic. In this paper, we propose a new approach to taxonomy expansion which is able to provide more flexible views. Based on an existing taxonomy, our algorithm finds possible alternative paths and generates an expanded taxonomy with flexibility in user browsing choices. In experiments on the dmoz Open Directory Project, the rebuilt taxonomies provide more alternative paths and shorter paths to information. User studies show that our expanded taxonomies are preferred compared to the original.

In Proceedings of the 19th ACM Conference on Information and Knowledge Management (CIKM), pages 1853-1856, Toronto, Canada, October 2010. ACM Press.

An extended report is available as Enhancing Taxonomies by Providing Many Paths. Technical Report LU-CSE-10-005, Dept. of Computer Science and Engineering, Lehigh University.

© ACM, 2010. This is the author's version of the work. It is posted here by permission of ACM for your personal use. Not for redistribution.

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Last modified: 12 December 2010
Brian D. Davison