Preprint submitted to Information Processing & Management Tags are a convenient way to label resources on the web. An interesting question is whether one can determine the semantic meaning of tags in the absence of some predefined formal structure like a thesaurus. Many authors have used the usage data for tags to find their emergent semantics. Here, we argue that the semantics of tags can be captured by comparing the contexts in which tags appear. We give an approach to operationalizing this idea by defining what we call paradigmatic similarity: computing co-occurrence distributions of tags with tags in the same context, and comparing tags using information theoretic similarity measures of these distributions, mostly the Jensen-Shannon divergence. In experiments with three different tagged data collections we study its behavior and compare it to other distance measures. For some tasks, like terminology mapping or clustering, the paradigmatic similarity seems to give better results than similarity measures based on the co-occurrence of the documents or other resources that the tags are associated to. We argue that paradigmatic similarity, is superior to other distance measures, if agreement on topics (as opposed to style, register or language etc.), is the most important criterion, and the main differences between the tagged elements in the data set correspond to different topics
Ulus Baker (1960 – 2007) was a Turkish-Cypriot sociologist, philosopher, and public intellectual. He was born in Ankara, Turkey in 1960. He studied Sociology at Middle East Technical University in Ankara, where he taught as a lecturer until 2004. Baker wrote prolifically in influential Turkish journals and made some of the first Turkish translations of various works of Gilles Deleuze, Antonio Negri, and other contemporary political philosophers. His profuse and accessible work and the novelty of the issues he enthusiastically introduced to Turkish-speaking intellectual circles, earned him a widely spread positive reputation in early age. He died in 2007 in Istanbul.The text in this edition is edited from essays and notes Ulus Baker wrote between 1995 and 2002. In these essays, Baker criticizes the sociological research turning into an analysis of people’s opinions. He explores with an exciting clarity the notion of ‘opinion’ as a specific form of apprehension between knowledge and point of view, then looks into ‘social types’ as an analytical device deployed by early sociologists. He associates the form of ‘comprehension’ the ‘social types’ postulate with Spinoza’s notion of ‘affections’ (as a dynamic, non-linguistic form of the relation between entities). He finally discusses the possibilities of reintroducing this device for understanding our contemporary world through cinema and documentary filmmaking, by reinstating images in general as ‘affective thought processes’.Baker’s first extensive translation to English provides us with a much-needed intervention for re-imagining social thought and visual media, at a time when sociology tends to be reduced to an analysis of ‘big data’, and the pedagogical powers of the image are reduced to data visualization and infographics.
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