Towards Twitter hashtag recommendation using distributed word representations and a deep feed forward neural network

Abstract

Hashtags are useful for categorizing and discovering content and conversations in online social networks. However, assigning hashtags requires additional user effort, hampering their widespread adoption. Therefore, in this paper, we introduce a novel approach for hashtag recommendation, targeting English language tweets on Twitter. First, we make use of a skip-gram model to learn distributed word representations (word2vec). Next, we make use of the distributed word representations learned to train a deep feed forward neural network. We test our deep neural network by recommending hashtags for tweets with user-assigned hashtags, using Mean Squared Error (MSE) as the objective function. We also test our deep neural network by recommending hashtags for tweets without user-assigned hashtags. Our experimental results show that the proposed approach recommends hashtags that are specific to the semantics of the tweets and that preserve the linguistic regularity of the tweets. In addition, our experimental results show that the proposed approach is capable of generating hashtags that have not been seen before.