Hit ratio: An Evaluation Metric for Hashtag Recommendation

Hashtag recommendation is a crucial task, especially with an increase of interest in using social media platforms such as Twitter in the last decade. Hashtag recommendation systems automatically suggest hashtags to a user while writing a tweet. Most of the research in the area of hashtag recommendation have used classical metrics such as hit rate, precision, recall, and F1-score to measure the accuracy of hashtag recommendation systems. These metrics are based on the exact match of the recommended hashtags with their corresponding ground truth. However, it is not clear how adequate these metrics to evaluate hashtag recommendation. The research question that we are interested in seeking an answer is: are these metrics adequate for evaluating hashtag recommendation systems when the numbers of ground truth hashtags in tweets are highly variable? In this paper, we propose a new metric which we call hit ratio for hashtag recommendation. Extensive evaluation through hypothetical examples and real-world application across a range of hashtag recommendation models indicate that the hit ratio is a useful metric. A comparison of hit ratio with the classical evaluation metrics reveals their limitations.