Weakly Supervised Attention for Hashtag Recommendation using Graph Data

Personalized hashtag recommendation for users could substantially promote user engagement in microblogging websites; users can discover microblogs aligned with their interests. However, user profiling on microblogging websites is challenging because most users tend not to generate content. Our core idea is to build a graph-based profile of users and incorporate it into hashtag recommendation. Indeed, user’s followee/follower links implicitly indicate their interests. Considering that microblogging networks are scale-free networks, to maintain the efficiency and effectiveness of the model, rather than analyzing the entire network, we model users based on their links towards hub nodes. That is, hashtags and hub nodes are projected into a shared latent space. To predict the relevance of a user to a hashtag, a projection of the user is built by aggregating the embeddings of her hub neighbors guided by an attention model and then compared with the hashtag. Classically, attention models can be trained in an end to end manner. However, due to the high complexity of our problem, we propose a novel weak supervision model for the attention component, which significantly improves the effectiveness of the model. We performed extensive experiments on two datasets collected from Twitter and Weibo, and the results confirm that our method substantially outperforms the baselines.