Microblog Hashtag Generation via Encoding Conversation Contexts

Yue Wang, Jing Li, Irwin King, Michael R. Lyu, Shuming Shi


Abstract
Automatic hashtag annotation plays an important role in content understanding for microblog posts. To date, progress made in this field has been restricted to phrase selection from limited candidates, or word-level hashtag discovery using topic models. Different from previous work considering hashtags to be inseparable, our work is the first effort to annotate hashtags with a novel sequence generation framework via viewing the hashtag as a short sequence of words. Moreover, to address the data sparsity issue in processing short microblog posts, we propose to jointly model the target posts and the conversation contexts initiated by them with bidirectional attention. Extensive experimental results on two large-scale datasets, newly collected from English Twitter and Chinese Weibo, show that our model significantly outperforms state-of-the-art models based on classification. Further studies demonstrate our ability to effectively generate rare and even unseen hashtags, which is however not possible for most existing methods.
Anthology ID:
N19-1164
Volume:
Proceedings of the 2019 Conference of the North American Chapter of the Association for Computational Linguistics: Human Language Technologies, Volume 1 (Long and Short Papers)
Month:
June
Year:
2019
Address:
Minneapolis, Minnesota
Venue:
NAACL
SIG:
Publisher:
Association for Computational Linguistics
Note:
Pages:
1624–1633
Language:
URL:
https://aclanthology.org/N19-1164
DOI:
10.18653/v1/N19-1164
Bibkey:
Cite (ACL):
Yue Wang, Jing Li, Irwin King, Michael R. Lyu, and Shuming Shi. 2019. Microblog Hashtag Generation via Encoding Conversation Contexts. In Proceedings of the 2019 Conference of the North American Chapter of the Association for Computational Linguistics: Human Language Technologies, Volume 1 (Long and Short Papers), pages 1624–1633, Minneapolis, Minnesota. Association for Computational Linguistics.
Cite (Informal):
Microblog Hashtag Generation via Encoding Conversation Contexts (Wang et al., NAACL 2019)
Copy Citation:
PDF:
https://preview.aclanthology.org/remove-xml-comments/N19-1164.pdf
Video:
 https://vimeo.com/364687803
Code
 yuewang-cuhk/HashtagGeneration