Exploiting Meta Attributes for Identifying Event Related Hashtags

Users in social media often participate in discussions regarding different events happening in the physical world (e.g., concerts, conferences, festivals) by posting messages, replying to or forwarding messages related to such events. In various applications like event recommendation, event reporting, etc. it might be useful to find user discussions related to such events from social media. Finding event related hashtags can be useful for this purpose. In this paper, we focus on the problem of finding relevant hashtags for a given event. Features are defined to identify the event related hashtags. We specifically look for features that use similarities of the hashtags with the event metadata attributes. A learning to rank algorithm is applied to learn the importance weights of the features towards the task of predicting the relevance of a hashtag to the given event. We experimented on events from four different categories (namely, Award ceremonies, E-commerce events, Festivals, and Product launches). Experimental results show that our method significantly outperforms the baseline methods