Demographics, in particular, gender, age, and race, are a key predictor of human behavior. Despite the significant effect that demographics plays, most scientific studies using online social media do not consider this factor, mainly due to the lack of such information. In this work, we use state-of-the-art face analysis software to infer gender, age, and race from profile images of 350K Twitter users from New York. For the period from November 1, 2014 to October 31, 2015, we study which hashtags are used by different demographic groups. Though we find considerable overlap for the most popular hashtags, there are also many group-specific hashtags.
Hashtags allow users to self-categorize their messages and to join a virtual conversation on a given topic. Users can search for tweets with a particular hashtag to learn about recent events on a topic of their choice. Hashtags are also frequently used in scientific studies as they are easier to obtain and handle than, say, LDA topics. A recent study on classifying hashtags and inferring semantic similarity can be found in @cite_4 .
@cite_4
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Hashtags are semantico-syntactic constructs used across various social networking and microblogging platforms to enable users to start a topic specific discussion or classify a post into a desired category. Segmenting and linking the entities present within the hashtags could therefore help in better understanding and extraction of information shared across the social media. However, due to lack of space delimiters in the hashtags (e.g #nsavssnowden), the segmentation of hashtags into constituent entities (“NSA” and “Edward Snowden” in this case) is not a trivial task. Most of the current state-of-the-art social media analytics systems like Sentiment Analysis and Entity Linking tend to either ignore hashtags, or treat them as a single word. In this paper, we present a context aware approach to segment and link entities in the hashtags to a knowledge base (KB) entry, based on the context within the tweet. Our approach segments and links the entities in hashtags such that the coherence between hashtag semantics and the tweet is maximized. To the best of our knowledge, no existing study addresses the issue of linking entities in hashtags for extracting semantic information. We evaluate our method on two different datasets, and demonstrate the effectiveness of our technique in improving the overall entity linking in tweets via additional semantic information provided by segmenting and linking entities in a hashtag. Since the introduction of microblogging services, there has been a continuous growth of short-text social networking on the Internet. With the generation of large amounts of microposts, there is a need for effective categorization and search of the data. Twitter, one of the largest microblogging sites, allows users to make use of hashtags to categorize their posts. However, the majority of tweets do not contain tags, which hinders the quality of the search results. In this paper, we propose a novel method for unsupervised and content-based hashtag recommendation for tweets. Our approach relies on Latent Dirichlet Allocation (LDA) to model the underlying topic assignment of language classified tweets. The advantage of our approach is the use of a topic distribution to recommend general hashtags. Hashtags, originally introduced in Twitter, are now becoming the most used way to tag short messages in social networks since this facilitates subsequent search, classification and clustering over those messages. However, extracting information from hashtags is difficult because their composition is not constrained by any (linguistic) rule and they usually appear in short and poorly written messages which are difficult to analyze with classic IR techniques. In this paper we address two challenging problems regarding the meaning of hashtags — namely, hashtag relatedness and hashtag classification - and we provide two main contributions. First we build a novel graph upon hashtags and (Wikipedia) entities drawn from the tweets by means of topic annotators (such as TagME); this graph will allow us to model in an efficacious way not only classic co-occurrences but also semantic relatedness among hashtags and entities, or between entities themselves. Based on this graph, we design algorithms that significantly improve state-of-the-art results upon known publicly available datasets. The second contribution is the construction and the public release to the research community of two new datasets: the former is a new dataset for hashtag relatedness, the latter is a dataset for hashtag classification that is up to two orders of magnitude larger than the existing ones. These datasets will be used to show the robustness and efficacy of our approaches, showing improvements in F1 up to two-digits in percentage (absolute). Twitter is one of the biggest platforms where massive instant messages (i.e. tweets) are published every day. Users tend to express their real feelings freely in Twitter, which makes it an ideal source for capturing the opinions towards various interesting topics, such as brands, products or celebrities, etc. Naturally, people may anticipate an approach to receiving the common sentiment tendency towards these topics directly rather than through reading the huge amount of tweets about them. On the other side, Hashtags, starting with a symbol "#" ahead of keywords or phrases, are widely used in tweets as coarse-grained topics. In this paper, instead of presenting the sentiment polarity of each tweet relevant to the topic, we focus our study on hashtag-level sentiment classification. This task aims to automatically generate the overall sentiment polarity for a given hashtag in a certain time period, which markedly differs from the conventional sentence-level and document-level sentiment analysis. Our investigation illustrates that three types of information is useful to address the task, including (1) sentiment polarity of tweets containing the hashtag; (2) hashtags co-occurrence relationship and (3) the literal meaning of hashtags. Consequently, in order to incorporate the first two types of information into a classification framework where hashtags can be classified collectively, we propose a novel graph model and investigate three approximate collective classification algorithms for inference. Going one step further, we show that the performance can be remarkably improved using an enhanced boosting classification setting in which we employ the literal meaning of hashtags as semi-supervised information. Experimental results on a real-life data set consisting of 29,195 tweets and 2,181 hashtags show the effectiveness of the proposed model and algorithms.