Hashtag the Tweets: Experimental Evaluation of Semantic Relatedness Measures

On Twitter, hashtags are used to summarize topics of the tweet content and to help search tweets. However, hashtags are created in a free style and thus heterogeneous, increasing difficulty of their usage. Therefore, it is important to evaluate that if they really represent the content they are attached with? In this work, we perform detailed experiments to find answer for this question. In addition to this, we compare different semantic relatedness measures to find this similarity between hashtags and tweets. Experiments are performed using ten different measures and Adapted Lesk is found to be the best.