News Meets Microblog: Hashtag Annotation via Retriever-Generator
This addresses the problem of generating hashtags for short microblog posts when conversations are unavailable, offering a practical solution for social media analysis.
The paper tackles hashtag annotation for microblog posts by proposing a Retriever-Generator framework that leverages news articles instead of conversations, demonstrating superior performance on English Twitter datasets.
Hashtag annotation for microblog posts has been recently formulated as a sequence generation problem to handle emerging hashtags that are unseen in the training set. The state-of-the-art method leverages conversations initiated by posts to enrich contextual information for the short posts. However, it is unrealistic to assume the existence of conversations before the hashtag annotation itself. Therefore, we propose to leverage news articles published before the microblog post to generate hashtags following a Retriever-Generator framework. Extensive experiments on English Twitter datasets demonstrate superior performance and significant advantages of leveraging news articles to generate hashtags.