Making sense of twitter

  • Authors:

  • David Laniado;Peter Mika

  • Affiliations:

  • DEI, Politecnico di Milano, Milan, Italy;Yahoo! Research, Barcelona, Spain

  • Venue:
  • ISWC'10 Proceedings of the 9th international semantic web conference on The semantic web - Volume Part I
  • Year:
  • 2010

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Abstract

Twitter enjoys enormous popularity as a micro-blogging service largely due to its simplicity. On the downside, there is little organization to the Twitterverse and making sense of the stream of messages passing through the system has become a significant challenge for everyone involved. As a solution, Twitter users have adopted the convention of adding a hash at the beginning of a word to turn it into a hashtag. Hashtags have become the means in Twitter to create threads of conversation and to build communities around particular interests. In this paper, we take a first look at whether hashtags behave as strong identifiers, and thus whether they could serve as identifiers for the Semantic Web. We introduce some metrics that can help identify hashtags that show the desirable characteristics of strong identifiers. We look at the various ways in which hashtags are used, and show through evaluation that our metrics can be applied to detect hashtags that represent real world entities.