Efficient Top-K Retrieval in Online Social Tagging Networks

We consider in this paper top-k query answering in social tagging (or bookmarking) applications. This problem requires a significant departure from existing, socially agnostic techniques. In a network-aware context, one can (and should) exploit the social links, which can indicate how users relate to the seeker and how much weight their tagging actions should have in the result build-up. We propose an algorithm that has the potential to scale to current applications. While the problem has already been considered in previous literature, this was done either under strong simplifying assumptions or under choices that cannot scale to even moderate-size real-world applications. We first revisit a key aspect of the problem, which is accessing the closest or most relevant users for a given seeker. We describe how this can be done on the fly (without any pre-computations) for several possible choices arguably the most natural ones of proximity computation in a user network. Based on this, our top-k algorithm is sound and complete, while addressing the applicability issues of the existing ones. Moreover, it performs significantly better and, importantly, it is instance optimal in the case when the search relies exclusively on the social weight of tagging actions. To further reduce response times, we then consider directions for efficiency by approximation. Extensive experiments on real world data show that our techniques can drastically improve the response time, without sacrificing precision.