Statistical and Semantic Approaches for Tweet Contextualization

Microblogging sites, like Twitter, have emerged as a popular platform for expressing opinions. Bound to 140 characters, Twitter's publications (tweets) are very short and not always written maintaining formal grammar and proper spelling. The spelling variations increase the likelihood of vocabulary mismatch and make the tweets difficult to understand without some kind of context. The task of tweet contextualization was organized around these issues. It aims to provide an automatic readable context explaining a given tweet, in order to help the reader understand this latter. In this paper, we describe statistical and semantic approaches for the tweet contextualization task. While the statistical one is based on association rules mining, the semantic one uses Wikipedia as an external knowledge source. The effectiveness of our approaches is proved through an experimental study conducted on the INEX 2013 collection.