An experimental study on the retrieval effectiveness of collaborative tags

This study investigated the retrieval effectiveness of tagging through experimental tests. We developed a test collection, a list of topics and corresponding relevance judgments using data collected from Pubmed and CiteULike. Two retrieval test runs were carried out, one without tags (baseline) and one with tags (tag run). General improvements in retrieval performance were observed from the tag run in terms of mean average precision and the difference is statistically significant though small. As revealed by the 11-point precision recall chart, the tag run retrieved more relevant documents at the top of the result list overall. The initial findings suggest that the use of tags in information retrieval has promise, especially in ranking the top retrieved documents.