Joint Estimation of Topics and Hashtag Relevance in Cross-Lingual Tweets

Abstract

Twitter is a widely used platform for sharing news articles. An emerging trend in multi-lingual communities is to share non-English news articles using English tweets in order to spread the news to a wider audience. In general, the choice of relevant hashtags for such tweets depends on the topic of the non-English news article. In this paper, we address the problem of automatically detecting the relevance of the hashtags of such tweets. More specifically, we propose a generative model to jointly model the topics within an English tweet and those within the non-English news article shared from it to predict the relevance of the hashtags of the tweet. For conducting experiments, we compiled a collection of English tweets that share news articles in Bengali (a South Asian language). Our experiments on this dataset demonstrate that this joint estimation based approach using the topics from both the non-English news articles and the tweets proves to be more effective for relevance estimation than that of only using the topics of a tweet itself.