Recommending Hashtags for Tweets Using Textual Similarity and Geographic Data

Abstract: Twitter is one of today’s largest and most popular social networks. The users of the service generate huge amounts of data each day and rely heavily on the service helping them find interesting tweets in short time. The concept of hashtags aids in this practice but relies on the users choosing to include the correct and commonly used hashtags for the topic of their tweet. Hashtag recommendation has been a target of research before with varying results. This thesis proposes a method taking the location of the users into account when making recommen- dations. The method generated improved results over just using similar tweets as a basis for recommendation. Various factors like the handling of different variations of vocabulary in the tweets, how many tweets the suggestions can be picked from and how the combination of similarity and geographic ranking should function could affect the result. This leads to the conclusion that geographic data can be used to improve hashtag suggestions, but a different approach in handling similarity and alternative combinations of similarity and geographic ranking could cause another result.