Suggestion: Provisional tags based on blurb

Description of your request or bug report:

:warning: tl;dr use AI to suggest tags based on the blurb and/or pull more info from sources

I think most content on Natively is lacking genre/content tags, which makes it difficult for users to find media they’d be interested in. While the level does play a part in deciding what to read, I think being able to find specific genres/content is also really important to keep a learner’s interest.

The most popular media, especially on the Japanese side, will probably have a good number of tags, but most content doesn’t due to the small number of people having read/watched the item, and of course, not everyone who reads a book will add tags. Even for Japanese, if you look at book series ranked by popularity there are 25.5k book series and only the first 5.5k have been rated (about 20%).

I think a lot of Japanese learners are already fans of anime/manga, and Japanese media is pretty popular with a huge amount of content translated into English, so finding native content that aligns with your particular interests isn’t so difficult. For other languages, there’s not really the same volume of readily available translated content, which makes it more difficult to find enjoyable media. I think it’s been mentioned here before the difference between the online presence of Japanese learners and learners of other languages - if you want recommendations for media, websites, software, etc, there’s a huge amount of information for Japanese learners compared to other languages.

There’s not much you can do about items that haven’t been read/graded and so don’t have a reliable level, but I think it would be really helpful if users were at least able to search for subjects they’re interested in, so they could have a selection of items to try out.

Ideas

  1. Use AI that has already been fed the tags available on Natively to scan the blurb and select appropriate tags (and perhaps make new tags). These would be provisional to help discover content, and users will be able to agree/disagree, which then makes them real tags (or disappear if they weren’t useful).

  2. If possible, pull more info from sources: Yes24 has a 관련분류 section which shows how books are categorised (for example, 국내도서 > 어린이 > 어린이 문학 > 그림/동화책 > 창작동화); Ridibooks has 이 작품의 키워드 (for example, #순정만화), and so on.

Related: Automated tag handling/prompting for new entries

This seems a bit related to:

I’ll leave them as separate entities for now because of how different the approach is between the two threads, but they can probably be handled together as they seek a similar outcome.

This has just reminded me that another option might be to use AL’s tags for anime, manga, and light novels, as the majority of their db is well-tagged.

I heavily sympathize on the “new content needs tags” thing, I’m skeptical of an AI-based approach

This seems like a better potential approach imo. Assuming AL is Anilist? Weren’t a lot of tags here populated from there in the first place?

There may be other useful dbs too… Tho they might not map well to existing Natively tags :thinking:

This is why I left them separated, I have a bit of skepticism as well.

Cool. I just meant to reply with that & elaborate back in February :sweat_smile: … So figured I’d chime in

Offtopic-ish

I’m resurfacing lots of old posts during the clean-up that I’m carrying, so don’t hesitate to chime in at any point on anything that is open.

I know it feels a bit weird replying to 2022-2023 requests :sweat_smile:

Just to point out the AI is just one suggestion, the other is to pull more info directly from the item page categories/tags on Amazon/Yes24/Ridibooks. :slightly_smiling_face:

AFAIK the tag list came from AL, but items weren’t populated with the tags from AL, they’ve been applied manually (CMIIW).

@Megumin The link you added to the OP is for this thread :sweat_smile:

It’s clear that I can’t be doing too many of these at the same time, I start making mistakes :sweat_smile:

Fixed, thanks for pointing it out