Predicting Cross-lingual Trends in Microblogs

Satoshi Akasaki


Abstract
Trends on microblogs often transcend linguistic boundaries, evolving into global phenomena with significant societal and economic impact. This paper introduces and tackles the novel predictive task of forecasting which microblog trends will cross linguistic boundaries to become popular in other languages, and when. While crucial for proactive global monitoring and marketing, this area has been under-explored. We introduce a methodology to overcome the challenge of cross-lingual trend identification by automatically constructing a dataset using Wikipedia’s inter-language links. We then propose a prediction model that leverages a rich feature set, including not only temporal frequency but also microblog content and external knowledge signals from Wikipedia. Our approach significantly outperforms existing trend prediction methods and LLM-based approaches, achieving an improvement of up to 4% in F1-score, enabling the forecast of cross-lingual trends before they emerge in a new language.
Anthology ID:
2025.emnlp-industry.36
Volume:
Proceedings of the 2025 Conference on Empirical Methods in Natural Language Processing: Industry Track
Month:
November
Year:
2025
Address:
Suzhou (China)
Editors:
Saloni Potdar, Lina Rojas-Barahona, Sebastien Montella
Venue:
EMNLP
SIG:
Publisher:
Association for Computational Linguistics
Note:
Pages:
530–539
Language:
URL:
https://preview.aclanthology.org/ingest-emnlp/2025.emnlp-industry.36/
DOI:
Bibkey:
Cite (ACL):
Satoshi Akasaki. 2025. Predicting Cross-lingual Trends in Microblogs. In Proceedings of the 2025 Conference on Empirical Methods in Natural Language Processing: Industry Track, pages 530–539, Suzhou (China). Association for Computational Linguistics.
Cite (Informal):
Predicting Cross-lingual Trends in Microblogs (Akasaki, EMNLP 2025)
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PDF:
https://preview.aclanthology.org/ingest-emnlp/2025.emnlp-industry.36.pdf