Forgetting the Words but Remembering the Meaning: Modeling Forgetting in a Verbal and Semantic Tag Recommender

We assume that recommender systems are more successful, when they are based on a thorough understanding of how people process information. In the current paper we test this assumption in the context of social tagging systems. Cognitive research on how people assign tags has shown that they draw on two interconnected levels of knowledge in their memory: on a conceptual level of semantic fields or LDA topics, and on a lexical level that turns patterns on the semantic level into words. Another strand of tagging research reveals a strong impact of time-dependent forgetting on users’ tag choices, such that recently used tags have a higher probability being reused than “older” tags. In this paper, we align both strands by implementing a computational theory of human memory that integrates the two-level conception and the process of forgetting in form of a tag recommender. Furthermore, we test the approach in three large-scale social tagging datasets that are drawn from BibSonomy, CiteULike and Flickr.