Segmenting Hashtags using Automatically Created Training Data

Abstract

Hashtags, which are commonly composed of multiple words, are increasingly used to convey the actual messages in tweets. Understanding what tweets are saying is getting more dependent on understanding hashtags. Therefore, identifying the individual words that constitute a hashtag is an important, yet a challenging task due to the abrupt nature of the language used in tweets. In this study, we introduce a feature-rich approach based on using supervised machine learning methods to segment hashtags. Our approach is unsupervised in the sense that instead of using manually segmented hashtags for training the machine learning classifiers, we automatically create our training data by using tweets as well as by automatically extracting hashtag segmentations from a large corpus. We achieve promising results with such automatically created noisy training data.

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