TweetSift: Tweet Topic Classification Based on Entity Knowledge Base and Topic Enhanced Word Embedding

Classifying tweets into topic categories is necessary and important for many applications, since tweets are about a variety of topics and users are only interested in certain topical areas. Many tweet classification approaches fail to achieve high accuracy due to data sparseness issue. Tweet, as a special type of short text, in additional to its text, also has other metadata that can be used to enrich its context, such as user name, mention, hashtag and embedded link. In this demonstration, we present TweetSift, an efficient and effective real time tweet topic classifier. TweetSift exploits external tweet- specific entity knowledge to provide more topical context for a tweet, and integrates them with topic enhanced word embeddings for topic classification. The demonstration will show how TweetSift works and how it is incorporated with our social media event detection system.