Exploiting hybrid contexts for Tweet segmentation

Twitter has attracted hundred millions of users to share and disseminate most up-to-date information. However, the noisy and short nature of tweets makes many applications in information retrieval (IR) and natural language processing (NLP) challenging. Recently, segment-based tweet representation has demonstrated effectiveness in named entity recognition (NER) and event detection from tweet streams. To split tweets into meaningful phrases or segments, the previous work is purely based on external knowledge bases, which ignores the rich local context information embedded in the tweets. In this paper, we propose a novel framework for tweet segmentation in a batch mode, called HybridSeg. HybridSeg incorporates local context knowledge with global knowledge bases for better tweet segmentation. HybridSeg consists of two steps: learning from off-the-shelf weak NERs and learning from pseudo feedback. In the first step, the existing NER tools are applied to a batch of tweets. The named entities recognized by these NERs are then employed to guide the tweet segmentation process. In the second step, HybridSeg adjusts the tweet segmentation results iteratively by exploiting all segments in the batch of tweets in a collective manner. Experiments on two tweet datasets show that HybridSeg significantly improves tweet segmentation quality compared with the state-of-the-art algorithm. We also conduct a case study by using tweet segments for the task of named entity recognition from tweets. The experimental results demonstrate that HybridSeg significantly benefits the downstream applications.