  Tags are short sequences of words allowing to describe textual and non-texual
resources such as as music, image or book. Tags could be used by machine
information retrieval systems to access quickly a document. These tags can be
used to build recommender systems to suggest similar items to a user. However,
the number of tags per document is limited, and often distributed according to
a Zipf law. In this paper, we propose a methodology to cluster tags into
conceptual groups. Data are preprocessed to remove power-law effects and
enhance the context of low-frequency words. Then, a hierarchical agglomerative
co-clustering algorithm is proposed to group together the most related tags
into clusters. The capabilities were evaluated on a sparse synthetic dataset
and a real-world tag collection associated with scientific papers. The task
being unsupervised, we propose some stopping criterion for selectecting an
optimal partitioning.
