USER STUDY OF THE ASSIGNMENT OF OBJECTIVE AND
SUBJECTIVE TYPE TAGS TO IMAGES IN INTERNET
Evaluation for Native and non Native English Language Taggers
David Nettleton
Department of Information Technology and Communications, Pompeu Fabra University
Tanger, 122-140, 08018 Barcelona, Spain
Mari-Carmen Marcos
Department of Journalism and Audiovisual Communication, Pompeu Fabra University
Roc Boronat,138, 08018 Barcelona, Spain
Bartolomé Mesa-Lao
Department of Translation and Interpreting, Autonomous University of Barcelona
Edifici K – Campus UAB, 08193 Barcelona, Spain
Keywords: Image tagging, Tag recommendation, User support, Statistical analysis, Data modeling.
Abstract: Image tagging in Internet is becoming a crucial aspect in the search activity of many users all over the
world, as online content evolves from being mainly text based, to being multi-media based (text, images,
sound, …). In this paper we present a study carried out for native and non native English language taggers,
with the objective of providing user support depending on the detected language skills and characteristics of
the user. In order to do this, we analyze the differences between how users tag objectively (using what we
call ‘see’ type tags) and subjectively (by what we call ‘evoke’ type tags). We study the data using bivariate
correlation, visual inspection and rule induction. We find that the objective/subjective factors are
discriminative for native/non native users and can be used to create a data model. This information can be
utilized to help and support the user during the tagging process.
1 INTRODUCTION
The ability to share multimedia information on the
Social Web has created the need to describe all of
this information. Nowadays, users uploading
information to the web have the possibility to tag (ie,
describe) content using keywords.
Among the possible limitations of tags created
by users, one could mention inconsistency among
users and typos, but there are also other factors
limiting the quality of these tags: the level of
linguistic competence in the language used by the
tagger. It seems reasonable that native language
users will tag in a more accurate and diverse way
than non native users.
Currently, English is the most common language
used on the Internet and many users describe
images, video and music in English even though it is
not their native language. For those users tagging in
a non-native language, it could be very useful to
have a system which can suggest tags already used
by other users, so they can have access to similar
content descriptions.
The main aim of this study is to discover how a
group of English native and non-native users tag
images on the Internet. To do so we have shown
them ten pictures and we asked them to describe
them both in an objective way (what do you actually
see in this picture?) and in a subjective way (which
feelings are aroused by this picture?).
Our hypothesis assumes that: (i) Tags created by
99
Nettleton D., Marcos M. and Mesa-Lao B. (2009).
USER STUDY OF THE ASSIGNMENT OF OBJECTIVE AND SUBJECTIVE TYPE TAGS TO IMAGES IN INTERNET - Evaluation for Native and non
Native English Language Taggers.
In Proceedings of the International Conference on Knowledge Discovery and Information Retrieval, pages 99-104
DOI: 10.5220/0002273900990104
Copyright
c
SciTePress
native speakers will be of higher quality (quality is
defined here in terms of quantity and variety of tags
used, once errors have been eliminated); (ii) The
quality of those tags created by native speakers will
become more apparent when they have to describe
feelings evoked by the picture rather than when they
objectively describe what is seen in the picture.
If this assumption is valid, we will have
objective data to design a recommendation system in
which tags would be automatically proposed to users
based on previous tagging sessions. These previous
sessions would only be selected from users
providing high quality tags (i.e. good tags in terms
of quantity and variety). This recommendation
system would help non-native taggers to work with
tags used by native taggers.
Goals and main contributions: to the best of our
knowledge there are non or few investigators
working on support for non-native taggers of
images, and making the distinction and support for
subjective versus objective tagging, which are two
of the main lines of our work presented in this paper.
2 STATE OF THE ART AND
RELATED WORK
We ask up to what point users with different
language skill levels vary in their way of indexing
contents which are similar or the same. Specifically,
we will look at the description of images, and the
difference between tags which represent feelings,
emotions or sensations compared with tags which
represent objective descriptions of the images
(Boehner, DePaula, Dourish, Sengers,
2007)(Isbister, Hook, 2007).
In recent years tag recommendation has become
a popular area of applied research, and of
commercial interest for the major search engine and
content providers (Yahoo, Google, Microsoft,
AOL…). Different approaches have been made to
tag recommendation, such as that based on
collective knowledge (Sigurbjörnsson, van Zwol,
2008), approaches based on analysis of the images
themselves (when the tags refer to images)
(Anderson, Raghunathan, Vogel, 2008),
collaborative approaches (Lee, 2007), a classic IR
approach by analyzing folksonomies (Lipczak,
Angelova, Milios, 2008), and systems based on
personalization (Garg, Weber, 2008). With respect
to considerations of non-native users, we can cite
works such as (Sood, Hammond, Owsley,
Birnbaum, 2007). Finally we can cite approaches
based on complex statistical models, such as (Song,
2008).
3 METHODOLOGY – DESIGN OF
EXPERIMENTS FOR USER
EVALUATION
For this study we have selected 10 photographs from
Flickr. The photographs we have used have been
chosen for their contrasting images and for their
potential to require different tags for ‘see’ and
‘evoke’. Image 1 is of a person with his hands to his
face; Image 2 is of a man and a woman caressing;
Image 3 is of a small spider in the middle of a web;
Image 4 is of a group of people dancing in a circle
with a sunset in the background; Image 5 is of a lady
holding a baby in her arms; Image 6 is of a boy
holding a gun ; Image 7 is of an old tree in the
desert, bent over by the wind; Image 8 is of a hand
holding a knife; Image 9 is a photo taken from above
of a large cage with a person lying on its floor;
finally, Image 10 is of a small bench on a horizon.
We have created a web site with a questionnaire
in which the user introduces his/her demographic
data, their tags for the photographs (tag session) and
some questions which the user answers after
completing the session. The capture of tag sessions
has been carried out for native and non-native
English, and our website reference is:
http://www.tradumatica.net/bmesa/interact2007/inde
x_en.htm .
Tag Session Capture. During a tag session the users
must assign between 4 and 10 tags which are related
to the objects which they can see in the image and a
similar number of tags related to what each image
evokes for them, in terms of sensations or emotions.
With reference to Figure 1, in the first column the
user writes the tags which express what they see in
the image, while in the second column the user
writes the tags which describe what the image
evokes. We have currently accumulated a total of
162 user tag sessions from 2 different countries,
involving the tasks of description of the photographs
in English. For approximately half of the users,
English is their native language and for the other
half it is a second language.
Raw Data and Derived Factors. From the tags
collected and the information which the users have
provided, we can compare results in the English
language used by native and non natives in that
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Figure 1: Example of how the user enters the tags for a
given image.
language. Our data is captured from taggers in the
United States (native) and from Spain (non native).
For each tag session, we collect the following
information: language in which the tag session is
conducted; easiest image to tag (user is asked); most
difficult image to tag (user is asked); the tags
themselves assigned for each image, for “See” and
“Evoke” separately, and the order in which the tag is
assigned. We also record the type of language (if the
current tagging language is native or not for the
user).
The following factors were derived from the
tagging session data (statistically averaged and
grouped by user and image):
-Easiness: average number of tags used for
“see” and “evoke”. This value is compared with the
question which refers to the ease or difficulty which
a user had to tag the image for “see” and in “evoke”.
One assumption is that the images evaluated as
easier to tag should have more tags. Also, users who
possess a greater descriptive vocabulary in the
tagging language should define a greater number of
tags.
-Similarity: frequency of the tags used for “see”
and for “evoke”. The tags which present a greater
frequency in each image will be compared to detect
similarities or differences between native and non-
native taggers.
-Spontaneity: tags used as first option for “see”
and for “evoke”. The tags which appear as first
option in each image will be compared to detect
similarities or differences between native and non-
native taggers.
4 DATA PROCESSING
In this section we explain the factors we derived
from the raw data and some statistics about the tags
themselves.
4.1 Derived Factors
The following factors were derived from the tag
session data:
“Easiness” is represented by the following six
factors: “anumTagsSee”, “anumTagsEvoke”,
“asnumTermsSee”, “asnumTermsEvoke”,
“aanumTermsSee” and “aanumTermsEvoke”. These
factors represent, respectively, the average number
(for all images) of tags used for “See”, the average
number (for all images) of tags used for “Evoke”,
the average of the sum (for each image) of the
number of terms used in each tag for “See”, the
average of the sum (for each image) of the number
of terms used in each tag for “Evoke”, the average
number of terms (for each tag) used for “See” tags
and the average number of terms (for each tag) used
for “Evoke” tags. We recall that all these values are
summarized by image and user, and that a tag
consists of one or more terms (individual words).
Similarity” is represented by the following
four factors: “asimSee”, “asimEvoke”, “atotSimSee”
and “atotSimEvoke”. The factor “aSimSee”
represents the average similarity of a given tagging
of an image by a given user for “See”, in comparison
with all other taggings of the same image by all
other users. This is essentially a frequency count of
tag coincidences. The factor “aSimEvoke”
represents the same statistic as “aSimSee”, but
calculated for the “Evoke” type tags. The factor
“atotSimSee” is equal to “asimSee’ divided by the
number of users, which gives a sort of ‘normalized’
value. The factor “atotSimEvoke” represents the
same statistic as “atotSimSee”, but calculated for the
“Evoke” type tags.
“Spontaneity” is represented by the following
two factors: “aespSee” and “aespEvoke”. The factor
“aespSee” represents the spontaneity of a given
tagging of an image in a given tag session for “See”,
by comparing it with the most frequent tags chosen
as first option for the same Image.
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Table 1: Derived dataset for data analysis and modeling.
Factor Name Factor
Type*
easiest
mostDifficult
anumTagsSee E
anumTagsEvoke E
asnumTermsSee E
asnumTermsEvoke E
aanumTermsSee E
aanumTermsEvoke E
asimSee SI
asimEvoke SI
atotSimSee SI
atotSimEvoke SI
aespSee SP
aespEvoke SP
typeLanguage
*E=easiness, SI=similarity, SP=spontaneity
The factor “aespEvoke” represents the same statistic
as “aespSee”, but calculated for the “Evoke” type
tags. With reference to Table 1, the derived ‘See
and ‘Evoke’ factor session data is held in a table
with this structure. All the data has been aggregated
by user and image. The attribute “typeLanguage” is
the “point of reference” for the data analysis and
modeling. If the users’ native language is not
English, then ‘typeLanguage’=2, whereas if the
users native language is English, then
‘typeLanguage’ = 1. This indicator is used as the
output, or labeling class.
4.2 Basic Statistics of Users and Tags
In this section we present the basic statistics and
frequencies for the tags assigned by the users, which
represents the data contained in the structure of
Table 1.
With respect to the user “demographic”
attributes, there was a similarity of characteristics in
terms of the proportions of each type of category,
between the native and the non-native groups. The
average user age is quite young, 28 and 19 years
respectively for native and non native taggers. This
is because the majority of the ‘volunteers’ were
university students.
4.2.1 Tag Statistics
With reference to the tags, in Table 2 we summarize
some of the most frequent tags for image 10 (small
bench on a horizon). Image 10 was considered one
of the most difficult images, only by the non natives.
Table 2: Most popular tags for see and evoke (Image 10).
See (tag, %*) Evoke (tag, %*)
Native bench 91.9 peace 29.7
sky 89.1 nature 16.2
grass 83.7 open 13.5
Non
native
sky 83.9 peace 34.7
grass 82.2 loneliness 29.7
bench 77.3 freedom 24.6
*percentage of the total of users who chose the tag
With reference to Table 2, we observe a clear
tendency for see and evoke type tags: the most
popular tags for ‘see’ have a much higher percentage
of users who chose them than the most popular tags
for ‘evoke’. This implies that for the evoke tags,
users chose tags which were more different with
respect to those of other users, and with a greater
distribution over a more diverse set of tags.
This is consistent with the hypothesis that a see
tag is assigned in a more stereotypic and
spontaneous manner, and that the evoke tag requires
more thought and is assigned as a more
individual/personal response to the image. If we
compare the tags of natives to those of non natives,
we see a general coincidence for the see type tags
(first three) and for the first evoke type tag.
In Figure 2, we see a plot of the log of the frequency
of occurrence of the tags (on the y axis) against the
tag id/index (on the x-axis). In general there is a
‘zipf’ type distribution with a small number of high
frequency tags and a larger number of unique tags.
A clear trend is evident between native and non
native taggers: the natives have a significantly
shorter tag distribution (the range for native evoke
tags {(d) in Figure 2} is from 1 to 83, whereas the
range for non-native evoke tags (b) is from 1 to 244.
This is due to the significantly higher error rate in
tag definition for non-natives which gives rise to a
significantly higher incidence of ‘unique’ tags. A
second trend is evident if we compare see and evoke
type tags: the see tags have a shorter distribution.
For example, in Figure 2 native see tags (c) range
from 1 to 32, whereas the native evoke tags (d)
range from 1 to 83. A similar subtrend is shown for
non native taggers. This confirms the hypothesis that
evoke tags are more diverse than see tags.
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Figure 2: Distributions of frequencies (log scale of y axis)
of tags for Image 10.
5 QUANTITATIVE EVALUATION
In this section we show results of the data analysis
and data modeling using the IM4Data (IBM
Intelligent Miner for Data V6.1.1) Data Mining tool
(Im4Data, 2002).
Data Analysis – Statistical Methods and
Visualization. Figures 3 and 4 are produced from
the ‘SessionD’ dataset for native English taggers and
non-native taggers, respectively. They are ordered
by the Chi-squared statistic relative to the
‘typeLanguage’ label. We recall that this dataset
contains attributes which represent the ‘easiness’,
‘similarity’ and ‘spontaneity’ factors for the user tag
sessions. Refer to the definitions of these factors in
Sections 3 and 4 of the paper. We observe that the
first four ranked attributes in Figure 3 (native) and
Figure 4 (non native) are ‘atotSimEvoke’,
‘mostDifficult’, ‘asimEvoke’ and ‘aespSee’,
although the ordering is different for attributes 2 to
4. From this we observe that two of the attributes
most related to the native/non native label (as
indicated by Chi-Squared) are variables related to
the similarity of the evoke type tags.
This is coherent with the hypothesis that non
native users will find it more difficult to think of
vocabulary to define emotions. If we look at the
distributions of ‘atotsimEvoke’ and ‘asimEvoke’ in
Figures 3 and 4, we see that the non-natives (Figure
4) have a greater frequency in the higher (rightmost)
part of the distribution, which means that there is
more coincidence between the non-native tags, and
therefore less diversity. Rule Extraction. The
IM4Data tree/rule induction algorithm was used for
data modeling. For testing, we have manually
created test datasets using a 5x2-fold cross-
validation. We used 14 input attributes: easiest,
mostDifficult, anumTagsSee, anumTagsEvoke,
asnumTermsSee, asnumTermsEvoke,
aanumTermsSee, aanumTermsEvoke, asimSee,
Figure 3: Distributions of variables of dataset ‘SessionD’,
for native English taggers.
Figure 4: Distributions of variables of dataset ‘SessionD’,
for non native taggers.
asimEvoke, atotSimSee, atotSimEvoke, aespSee,
aespEvoke; and one output attribute (class):
‘typeLanguage’.
With reference to Figure 5, we see the pruned
tree induced by IM4Data on the SessionD dataset,
including the details of the decision nodes and
classification nodes. We observe that attributes
‘asimEvoke’ and ‘mostDifficult’ have been used in
the upper part of the tree (asimEvoke < 138.15,
mostDifficult in [image9, image3, ,image10,
image7]). Thus, they represent the most general and
USER STUDY OF THE ASSIGNMENT OF OBJECTIVE AND SUBJECTIVE TYPE TAGS TO IMAGES IN
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Figure 5: Pruned Classification Tree: dataset ‘SessionD’.
discriminatory factors to classify ‘typeLanguage’,
that is the native and non-native users. We note that
lower down in the tree the attribute
‘asnumTermsSee’ has been used.
With reference to Table 3, we present the test
results (test folds) for the tree induction model built
from the SessionD factors. The overall precision of
the model over 5 folds is 75.63%. The low
percentage of false positives and false negatives over
the five folds indicates that we have a ‘robust’
model. We conclude from the results that with the
derived factors for ‘Easiness’, ‘Similarity’ and
‘Spontaneity’ we are able to produce an acceptably
precise model (75.63%), using real data and
‘typeLanguage’ as the output class. This model
distinguishes between English native and non-native
taggers, based on the given input variables and
derived factors.
Table 3: ‘SessionD’: test precision for 5x2 fold cross
validation.
native† non-
native††
MP*
fold1 65.5, 21.1 78.9, 34.5 71.08
fold2 88.3, 32.2 67.8, 11.7 77.07
fold3 85.2, 33.9 66.1, 14.3 76.17
fold4 70.6, 34.4 65.6, 29.4 77.60
fold5 89.6, 35.0 65.0, 10.4 76.42
Geometric mean
for folds
79.2, 30.8 68.5, 17.7 75.63
*MP=Model Precision †{%Rate: True Positive, False
Positive}, ††,{%Rate: True Negative, False Negative}
6 CONCLUSIONS
As conclusions from the present work and the
available data and derived factors, we can
reasonably infer that there is a significant difference
between “see” and “evoke” type tags, which is
related to if the user is native or not in the tagging
language. We have successfully built a data model
from the derived factors (Figure 5, Table 3). We
have determined that non native taggers have
distinctive characteristics especially for the
similarity of subjective type tags. The initial
hypothesis of greater quality and diversity of tags
has been confirmed for native users. From a user
support point of view, the findings can be used in
online applications, for example, the
recommendation of evoke type tags for non-native
users by using the tags defined by the best native
taggers.
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