Text from social media provides a set of challenges that can cause traditional NLP approaches to fail. Informal language, spelling errors, abbreviations, and special characters are all commonplace in these posts, leading to a prohibitively large vocabulary size for word-level approaches. We propose a character composition model, tweet2vec, which finds vector-space representations of whole tweets by learning complex, non-local dependencies in character sequences. The proposed model outperforms a word-level baseline at predicting user-annotated hashtags associated with the posts, doing significantly better when the input contains many out-of-vocabulary words or unusual character sequences. Our tweet2vec encoder is publicly available.
@cite_16: Since the introduction of microblogging services, there has been a continuous growth of short-text social networking on the Internet. With the generation of large amounts of microposts, there is a need for effective categorization and search of the data. Twitter, one of the largest microblogging sites, allows users to make use of hashtags to categorize their posts. However, the majority of tweets do not contain tags, which hinders the quality of the search results. In this paper, we propose a novel method for unsupervised and content-based hashtag recommendation for tweets. Our approach relies on Latent Dirichlet Allocation (LDA) to model the underlying topic assignment of language classified tweets. The advantage of our approach is the use of a topic distribution to recommend general hashtags.
@cite_8: We describe a convolutional neural network that learns feature representations for short textual posts using hashtags as a supervised signal. The proposed approach is trained on up to 5.5 billion words predicting 100,000 possible hashtags. As well as strong performance on the hashtag prediction task itself, we show that its learned representation of text (ignoring the hashtag labels) is useful for other tasks as well. To that end, we present results on a document recommendation task, where it also outperforms a number of baselines.
Hashtag prediction for social media has been addressed earlier, for example in @cite_8 @cite_16 . @cite_8 also use a neural architecture, but compose text embeddings from a lookup table of words. They also show that the learned embeddings can generalize to an unrelated task of document recommendation, justifying the use of hashtags as supervision for learning text representations.