Enhancing accessibility of microblogging messages using semantic knowledge

The volume of microblogging messages is increasing exponentially with the popularity of microblogging services. With a large number of messages appearing in user interfaces, it hinders user accessibility to useful information buried in disorganized, incomplete, and unstructured text messages. In order to enhance user accessibility, we propose to aggregate related microblogging messages into clusters and automatically assign them semantically meaningful labels. However, a distinctive feature of microblogging messages is that they are much shorter than conventional text documents. These messages provide inadequate term co occurrence information for capturing semantic associations. To address this problem, we propose a novel framework for organizing unstructured microblogging messages by transforming them to a semantically structured representation. The proposed framework first captures informative tree fragments by analyzing a parse tree of the message, and then exploits external knowledge bases (Wikipedia and WordNet) to enhance their semantic information. Empirical evaluation on a Twitter dataset shows that our framework significantly outperforms existing state-of-the-art methods.