Forgetting the Words but Remembering the Meaning: Modeling Forgetting in a Verbal and Semantic Tag Recommender

We assume that recommender systems are more successful, when they are based on a thorough understanding of how people process information. In the current paper we test this assumption in the context of social tagging systems. Cognitive research on how people assign tags has shown that they draw on two interconnected levels of knowledge in their memory: on a conceptual level of semantic fields or topics, and on a lexical level that turns patterns on the semantic level into words. Another strand of tagging research reveals a strong impact of time dependent forgetting on users' tag choices, such that recently used tags have a higher probability being reused than "older" tags. In this paper, we align both strands by implementing a computational theory of human memory that integrates the two-level conception and the process of forgetting in form of a tag recommender and test it in three large-scale social tagging datasets (drawn from BibSonomy, CiteULike and Flickr). As expected, our results reveal a selective effect of time: forgetting is much more pronounced on the lexical level of tags. Second, an extensive evaluation based on this observation shows that a tag recommender interconnecting both levels and integrating time dependent forgetting on the lexical level results in high accuracy predictions and outperforms other well-established algorithms, such as Collaborative Filtering, Pairwise Interaction Tensor Factorization, FolkRank and two alternative time dependent approaches. We conclude that tag recommenders can benefit from going beyond the manifest level of word co-occurrences, and from including forgetting processes on the lexical level.