Methods for extracting place semantics from Flickr tags

We describe an approach for extracting semantics for tags, unstructured text-labels assigned to resources on the Web, based on each tag's usage patterns. In particular, we focus on the problem of extracting place semantics for tags that are assigned to photos on Flickr, a popular-photo sharing Web site that supports location (latitude/longitude) metadata for photos. We propose the adaptation of two baseline methods, inspired by well-known burst-analysis techniques, for the task; we also describe two novel methods, TagMaps and scale-structure identification. We evaluate the methods on a subset of Flickr data. We show that our scale-structure identification method outperforms existing techniques and that a hybrid approach generates further improvements (achieving 85% precision at 81% recall). The approach and methods described in this work can be used in other domains such as geo-annotated Web pages, where text terms can be extracted and associated with usage patterns.