Language Evolution and Computation Bibliography

The enormous increase of popularity and use of the worldwide web has led in the recent years to important changes in the ways people communicate. An interesting example of this fact is provided by the now very popular social annotation systems, through which users annotate resources (such as web pages or digital photographs) with keywords known as ``tags.'' Understanding the rich emergent structures resulting from the uncoordinated actions of users calls for an interdisciplinary effort. In particular concepts borrowed from statistical physics, such as random walks (RWs), and complex networks theory, can effectively contribute to the mathematical modeling of social annotation systems. Here, we show that the process of social annotation can be seen as a collective but uncoordinated exploration of an underlying semantic space, pictured as a graph, through a series of RWs. This modeling framework reproduces several aspects, thus far unexplained, of social annotation, among which are the peculiar growth of the size of the vocabulary used by the community and its complex network structure that represents an externalization of semantic structures grounded in cognition and that are typically hard to access.

Collaborative tagging has been quickly gaining ground because of its ability to recruit the activity of web users into effectively organizing and sharing vast amounts of information. Here we collect data from a popular system and investigate the statistical properties of tag cooccurrence. We introduce a stochastic model of user behavior embodying two main aspects of collaborative tagging: (i) a frequency-bias mechanism related to the idea that users are exposed to each other's tagging activity; (ii) a notion of memory, or aging of resources, in the form of a heavy-tailed access to the past state of the system. Remarkably, our simple modeling is able to account quantitatively for the observed experimental features with a surprisingly high accuracy. This points in the direction of a universal behavior of users who, despite the complexity of their own cognitive processes and the uncoordinated and selfish nature of their tagging activity, appear to follow simple activity patterns.

A distributed classification paradigm known as collaborative tagging has been successfully deployed in large-scale web applications designed to manage and share diverse online resources. Users of these applications organize resources by associating with them freely chosen text labels, or tags. Here we regard tags as basic dynamical entities and study the semiotic dynamics underlying collaborative tagging. We collect data from a popular system and focus on tags associated with a given resource. We find that the frequencies of tags obey to a generalized Zipf's law and show that a Yule-Simon process with memory can be used to explain the observed frequency distributions in terms of a simple model of user behavior