On Analyzing Hashtags in Twitter

Hashtags, originally introduced in Twitter, are now becoming the most used way to tag short messages in social networks since this facilitates subsequent search, classification and clustering over those messages. However, extracting information from hashtags is difficult because their composition is not constrained by any (linguistic) rule and they usually appear in short and poorly written messages which are difficult to analyze with classic IR techniques. In this paper we address two challenging problems regarding the meaning of hashtags — namely, hashtag relatedness and hashtag classification - and we provide two main contributions. First we build a novel graph upon hashtags and (Wikipedia) entities drawn from the tweets by means of topic annotators (such as TagME); this graph will allow us to model in an efficacious way not only classic co-occurrences but also semantic relatedness among hashtags and entities, or between entities themselves. Based on this graph, we design algorithms that significantly improve state-of-the-art results upon known publicly available datasets. The second contribution is the construction and the public release to the research community of two new datasets: the former is a new dataset for hashtag relatedness, the latter is a dataset for hashtag classification that is up to two orders of magnitude larger than the existing ones. These datasets will be used to show the robustness and efficacy of our approaches, showing improvements in F1 up to two-digits in percentage (absolute).