Enhancing Navigability:An Algorithm for Constructing Tag Trees

Purpose： This study introduces an algorithm to construct tag trees that can be used as a userfriendly navigation tool for knowledge sharing and retrieval by solving two issues of previous studies, i.e. semantic drift and structural skew.Design/methodology/approach： Inspired by the generality based methods, this study builds tag trees from a co-occurrence tag network and uses the h-degree as a node generality metric. The proposed algorithm is characterized by the following four features：（1） the ancestors should be more representative than the descendants,（2） the semantic meaning along the ancestor-descendant paths needs to be coherent,（3） the children of one parent are collectively exhaustive and mutually exclusive in describing their parent, and（4） tags are roughly evenly distributed to their upper-level parents to avoid structural skew. Findings： The proposed algorithm has been compared with a well-established solution Heymann Tag Tree（HTT）. The experimental results using a social tag dataset showed that the proposed algorithm with its default condition outperformed HTT in precision based on Open Directory Project（ODP） classification. It has been verified that h-degree can be applied as a better node generality metric compared with degree centrality.Research limitations： A thorough investigation into the evaluation methodology is needed, including user studies and a set of metrics for evaluating semantic coherence and navigation performance.Practical implications： The algorithm will benefit the use of digital resources by generating a flexible domain knowledge structure that is easy to navigate. It could be used to manage multiple resource collections even without social annotations since tags can be keywords created by authors or experts, as well as automatically extracted from text.Originality/value： Few previous studies paid attention to the issue of whether the tagging systems are easy to navigate for users. The contributions of this study are twofold：（1） an algorithm was developed to construct tag trees with consideration given to both semanticcoherence and structural balance and（2） the effectiveness of a node generality metric, h-degree, was investigated in a tag co-occurrence network.

A comparative study of two formal semantics of the SIGNAL language

SIGNAL is a part of the synchronous languages family, which are broadly used in the design of safety-critical real-time systems such as avionics, space systems, and nu- clear power plants. There exist several semantics for SIG- NAL, such as denotational semantics based on traces （called trace semantics）, denotational semantics based on tags （called tagged model semantics）, operational semantics presented by structural style through an inductive definition of the set of possible transitions, operational semantics defined by syn- chronous transition systems （STS）, etc. However, there is lit- tle research about the equivalence between these semantics. In this work, we would like to prove the equivalence be- tween the trace semantics and the tagged model semantics, to get a determined and precise semantics of the SIGNAL language. These two semantics have several different defini- tions respectively, we select appropriate ones and mechanize them in the Coq platform, the Coq expressions of the abstract syntax of SIGNAL and the two semantics domains, i.e., the trace model and the tagged model, are also given. The dis- tance between these two semantics discourages a direct proof of equivalence. Instead, we transform them to an intermediate model, which mixes the features of both the trace semantics and the tagged model semantics. Finally, we get a determined and precise semantics of SIGNAL.

Image Tagging by Semantic Neighbor Learning Using User-Contributed Social Image Datasets

The explosive increase in the number of images on the Internet has brought with it the great challenge of how to effectively index, retrieve, and organize these resources. Assigning proper tags to the visual content is key to the success of many applications such as image retrieval and content mining. Although recent years have witnessed many advances in image tagging, these methods have limitations when applied to high-quality and large-scale training data that are expensive to obtain. In this paper, we propose a novel semantic neighbor learning method based on user-contributed social image datasets that can be acquired from the Web＇s inexhaustible social image content. In contrast to existing image tagging approaches that rely on high-quality image-tag supervision, we acquire weak supervision of our neighbor learning method by progressive neighborhood retrieval from noisy and diverse user-contributed image collections. The retrieved neighbor images are not only visually alike and partially correlated but also semantically related. We offer a step-by-step and easy-to-use implementation for the proposed method. Extensive experimentation on several datasets demonstrates that the performance of the proposed method significantly outperforms others.