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the record · 2006 · computational aesthetics

Unraveling the taste fabric of social networks

Hugo Liu, Pattie Maes & Glorianna Davenport (2006). International Journal on Semantic Web and Information Systems 2(1), 42–71. Reprinted 2008, Idea Group.

252 citations
PDFDOI

Taste Fabric turns co-occurrence among favorite things into a reusable cultural map. A six-month crawl gathered 100,000 profiles from two social networks. Heuristic segmentation and an ontology of 22,000 interest and identity descriptors recognized 68 percent of tokens; pointwise mutual information produced a dense relation matrix later reduced to 12,000 descriptors. Spreading activation formed “taste ethoi” for recommendation, comparison, Ambient Semantics, and Identity Mirror. In five-fold held-out-profile tests, the full model scored 0.86 on graded percentile rank, compared with 0.73 for direct pairwise association. The paper also records the costs: overlapping populations, a static snapshot, unrecognized and falsely mapped terms, unevaluated neighborhood morphology, and no re-identification audit. Its metric measures recovery of withheld profile items, not lived recommendation quality.

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