Characterizing use and quality of textual attributes in Web 2.0 applications

Despite the large amount of multimedia content in Web 2.0 applications, most of its services in Information Retrieval (IR) use only attributes associated with textual content (eg, labels or tags). However, because they are typically generated by users, such attributes do not offer guarantees of quality for IR services. Here, we investigate evidence of quality of textual attributes in popular Web 2.0 applications related to three aspects: utilization; discriminative and descriptive power. We have performed a characterization of the use of four textual attributes (title, description, tags and comments) in the following systems: Youtube, YahooVideo, LastFM and CiteULike. Some of our results, which may be considered in the design of IR services in Web 2.0, are: (1) collaborative textual attributes, although not significantly exploited in some applications, contain the largest amount of information when present, (2) there is a significant diversity of information between the textual attributes, and (3) the title and tags of the objects seem to be the most promising attributes for IR services, whereas the former is almost always present and has a high power specification, and second, when used, has a high discriminative and descriptive power.