Applications of Semantic Technologies at INFORMATIK 2011 - Informatik schafft Communities
Berlin 2011

Abstract: Microblog posts may contain so-called hashtags that mark keywords or topics. These hashtags are used in an ad-hoc fashion; their meaning is implicitly defined via their use, which makes understanding and querying hashtags difficult. In this paper we devise a method for annotating microblog posts which contain hashtags with related encyclopedia entities. Thus, users have the means to quickly grasp the meaning of a hashtag, and find starting points for further exploration of the hashtags’ context. We implement our method based on Twitter and an existing system for linking content to Wikipedia.