Hashtags as Milestones in Time
Stewart Whiting, Omar Alonso · 2012
On Twitter, hashtags are typically used by authors wishing to explicitly denote the relevant topic(s) contained in their message, especially when the text quantity is limited. Hashtags are widely used by both tweet authors as well as users searching for specific topics. As such, frequently used hashtags often reflect either mainstream events in real-time, or circulating memes. In this paper we propose an approach to identify significant event-based hashtags and use them as annotations for constructing timelines. Such timelines allow easy time-based navigation of hashtagged information. To determine temporally significant hashtags, we correlate the periods of hashtag use in the Bing Social search engine query-log with the periods of high page viewing popularity of the Wikipedia article(s) most related to the words contained in the hashtag. Preliminary results suggest that the technique is effective for hashtags arising from large-scale events, including hurricanes, celebrities, music releases, television shows and sports games.