Attend and Select: A Segment Attention based Selection Mechanism for Microblog Hashtag Generation

Automatic microblog hashtag generation can help us better and faster understand or process the critical content of microblog posts. Conventional sequence-to-sequence generation methods can produce phrase-level hashtags and have achieved remarkable performance on this task. However, they are incapable of filtering out secondary information and not good at capturing the discontinuous semantics among crucial tokens. A hashtag is formed by tokens or phrases that may originate from various fragmentary segments of the original text. In this work, we propose an end-to-end Transformer-based generation model which consists of three phases: encoding, segments-selection, and decoding. The model transforms discontinuous semantic segments from the source text into a sequence of hashtags. Specifically, we introduce a novel Segments Selection Mechanism (SSM) for Transformer to obtain segmental representations tailored to phrase-level hashtag generation. Besides, we introduce two large-scale hashtag generation datasets, which are newly collected from Chinese Weibo and English Twitter. Extensive evaluations on the two datasets reveal our approach's superiority with significant improvements to extraction and generation baselines. The code and datasets are available at \url{https://github.com/OpenSUM/HashtagGen}.