Combating spam in tagging systems

Abstract

Tagging systems allow users to interactively annotate a pool of shared resources using descriptive strings, which are called tags. Tags are used to guide users to interesting resources and help them build communities that share their expertise and resources. As tagging systems are gaining in popularity, they become more susceptible to tag spam: misleading tags that are generated in order to increase the visibility of some resources or simply to confuse users. Our goal is to understand this problem better. In particular, we are interested in answers to questions such as: How many malicious users can a tagging system tolerate before results significantly de-grade? What types of tagging systems are more vulnerable to malicious attacks? What would be the effort and the impact of employing a trusted moderator to find bad postings? Can a system automatically protect itself from spam, for instance , by exploiting user tag patterns? In a quest for answers to these questions, we introduce a framework for mod-eling tagging systems and user tagging behavior. We also describe a method for ranking documents matching a tag based on taggers' reliability. Using our framework, we study the behavior of existing approaches under malicious attacks and the impact of a moderator and our ranking method.

Die Free or Live Hard? Empirical Evaluation and New Design for Fighting Evolving Twitter Spammers

“…Cha et al [25] design diverse metrics to measure Twitter accounts. In addition, since spam and attacks are so rampant in online social networking sites, Koutrika et al [30] propose techniques to detect tag spam in tagging systems. Benevenuto et al [24,23] utilize machine learning techniques to identify video spammers in video social networks.…”

Spam Fighting in Social Tagging Systems

“…Koutrika et al [12] were the first to explicitly discuss methods of tackling spamming activities in social tagging systems. The authors studied the impact of spamming through a framework for modeling social tagging systems and user tagging behavior.…”

“…First, spammers can use legitimate resources and assign irrelevant tags to them for the purpose of advertisement or self-promotion [3]. Second, spammers can use popular and high ranking tags to describe a spam resource and boost its rank [12]. Therefore, one of the most important issues in social tagging systems is to identify appropriate tags and at the same time filter or eliminate spam content or spammers.…”

Automatic Web Tagging and Person Tagging Using Language Models

“…Recently, researchers have started to realize the importance of social bookmarking. This leads to the exploration of tagging logs in different ways [5,10,4,8,7,15]. Most work are focusing on utilizing social tags, instead of suggesting tags.…”

“…Most work are focusing on utilizing social tags, instead of suggesting tags. Folksonomy [10], tagging visualization [4], and spam detection for tagging system [8] are some of such examples. [2] utilizes social tags to help summarization.…”