  Short text messages such as tweets are very noisy and sparse in their use of
vocabulary. Traditional textual representations, such as tf-idf, have
difficulty grasping the semantic meaning of such texts, which is important in
applications such as event detection, opinion mining, news recommendation, etc.
We constructed a method based on semantic word embeddings and frequency
information to arrive at low-dimensional representations for short texts
designed to capture semantic similarity. For this purpose we designed a
weight-based model and a learning procedure based on a novel median-based loss
function. This paper discusses the details of our model and the optimization
methods, together with the experimental results on both Wikipedia and Twitter
data. We find that our method outperforms the baseline approaches in the
experiments, and that it generalizes well on different word embeddings without
retraining. Our method is therefore capable of retaining most of the semantic
information in the text, and is applicable out-of-the-box.
