A hashtags dictionary from crowdsourced definitions

Abstract

Hashtags are user-defined terms used on the Web to tag messages like microposts, as featured on Twitter. Because a hashtag is a textual word, its representation does not convey all the concepts it embodies. Several online dictionaries have been manually and collaboratively built to provide natural language definitions of hashtags. Unfortunately, these dictionaries in their rough form are inefficient for their inclusion in automatic text processing systems. As hashtags can be polysemic, dictionaries are also agnostic to collision of hashtags. This paper presents our approach for the automatic structuration of hashtags definitions into synonym rings. We present the output as a so-called folksionary, i.e. a single integrated dictionary built from everybody's definitions. For this purpose, we achieved a semantic-relatedness clustering to group definitions that share the same meaning.