Hashtag-centric Immersive Search on Social Media

Social media information distributes in different Online Social Networks (OSNs). This paper addresses the problem integrating the cross-OSN information to facilitate an immersive social media search experience. We exploit hashtag, which is widely used to annotate and organize multi-modal items in different OSNs, as the bridge for information aggregation and organization. A three-stage solution framework is proposed for hashtag representation, clustering and demonstration. Given an event query, the related items from three OSNs, Twitter, Flickr and YouTube, are organized in cluster-hashtag-item hierarchy for display. The effectiveness of the proposed solution is validated by qualitative and quantitative experiments on hundreds of trending event queries.