Self-organization in social tagging systems

Chuang Liu*, Chi Ho Yeung, Zi-Ke Zhang

*Corresponding author for this work

    Research output: Contribution to journalArticlepeer-review

    Abstract

    Individuals often imitate each other to fall into the typical group, leading to a self-organized state of typical behaviors in a community. In this paper, we model self-organization in social tagging systems and illustrate the underlying interaction and dynamics. Specifically, we introduce a model in which individuals adjust their own tagging tendency to imitate the average tagging tendency. We found that when users are of low confidence, they tend to imitate others and lead to a self-organized state with active tagging. On the other hand, when users are of high confidence and are stubborn to change, tagging becomes inactive. We observe a phase transition at a critical level of user confidence when the system changes from one regime to the other. The distributions of post length obtained from the model are compared to real data, which show good agreement.

    Original languageEnglish
    Article number066104
    Number of pages6
    JournalPhysical Review E
    Volume83
    Issue number6
    DOIs
    Publication statusPublished - 9 Jun 2011

    Bibliographical note

    ©2011 American Physical Society. Self-organization in social tagging systems. Chuang Liu, Chi Ho Yeung, and Zi-Ke Zhang. Phys. Rev. E 83, 066104 – Published 9 June 2011

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