@inproceedings{maddela-etal-2019-multi,
    title = "Multi-task Pairwise Neural Ranking for Hashtag Segmentation",
    author = "Maddela, Mounica  and
      Xu, Wei  and
      Preo{\c{t}}iuc-Pietro, Daniel",
    editor = "Korhonen, Anna  and
      Traum, David  and
      M{\`a}rquez, Llu{\'i}s",
    booktitle = "Proceedings of the 57th Annual Meeting of the Association for Computational Linguistics",
    month = jul,
    year = "2019",
    address = "Florence, Italy",
    publisher = "Association for Computational Linguistics",
    url = "https://preview.aclanthology.org/fix-sig-urls/P19-1242/",
    doi = "10.18653/v1/P19-1242",
    pages = "2538--2549",
    abstract = "Hashtags are often employed on social media and beyond to add metadata to a textual utterance with the goal of increasing discoverability, aiding search, or providing additional semantics. However, the semantic content of hashtags is not straightforward to infer as these represent ad-hoc conventions which frequently include multiple words joined together and can include abbreviations and unorthodox spellings. We build a dataset of 12,594 hashtags split into individual segments and propose a set of approaches for hashtag segmentation by framing it as a pairwise ranking problem between candidate segmentations. Our novel neural approaches demonstrate 24.6{\%} error reduction in hashtag segmentation accuracy compared to the current state-of-the-art method. Finally, we demonstrate that a deeper understanding of hashtag semantics obtained through segmentation is useful for downstream applications such as sentiment analysis, for which we achieved a 2.6{\%} increase in average recall on the SemEval 2017 sentiment analysis dataset."
}