Understanding short texts is crucial to many applications, but
challenges abound. Here we focus on short texts which refer to texts
with limited context. These short texts are produced, including Search
queries, Tags, Keywords, Conversation or Social posts and containing
limited context. Semantic knowledge is required in order to better
understand short texts. First, short texts do not always observe the
syntax of a written language. As a result, traditional natural language
processing tools, ranging from part-of-speech tagging to dependency
parsing, cannot be easily applied. Second, short texts usually do not
contain sufficient statistical signals to support many state-of-the-art
approaches for text mining such as topic modeling. Third, short texts
are more ambiguous and noisier and are generated in an enormous volume,
which further increases the difficulty to handle them. the book deals
the knowledge-intensive approaches for discovering semantics of short
texts.