A hashtag recommendation system for twitter data streams

Abstract

Background: Twitter has evolved into a powerful communication and information sharing tool used by millions of people around the world to post what is happening now. A hashtag, a keyword prefixed with a hash symbol (#), is a feature in Twitter to organize tweets and facilitate effective search among a massive volume of data. In this paper, we propose an automatic hashtag recommendation system that helps users find new hashtags related to their interests on-demand. Methods: For hashtag ranking, we propose the Hashtag Frequency-Inverse Hashtag Ubiquity (HF-IHU) ranking scheme, which is a variation of the well-known TF-IDF, that considers hashtag relevancy, as well as data sparseness which is one of the key challenges in analyzing microblog data. Our system is built on top of Hadoop, a leading platform for distributed computing, to provide scalable performance using Map-Reduce. Experiments on a large Twitter data set demonstrate that our method successfully yields relevant hashtags for user’s interest and that recommendations are more stable and reliable than ranking tags based on tweet content similarity. Results and conclusions: Our results show that HF-IHU can achieve over 30 % hashtag recall when asked to identify the top 10 relevant hashtags for a particular tweet. Furthermore, our method out-performs kNN, k-popularity, and Naïve Bayes by 69, 54, and 17 %, respectively, on recall of the top 200 hashtags.