Why They Link: An Intent Taxonomy for Including Hyperlinks in Social Posts

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Hauptverfasser: Lan, Fangping, Aljebreen, Abdullah, Dragut, Eduard C.
Format: Preprint
Veröffentlicht: 2026
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author Lan, Fangping
Aljebreen, Abdullah
Dragut, Eduard C.
author_facet Lan, Fangping
Aljebreen, Abdullah
Dragut, Eduard C.
contents URLs serve as bridges between social media platforms and the broader web, linking user-generated content to external information resources. On Twitter (X), approximately one in five tweets contains at least one URL, underscoring their central role in information dissemination. While prior studies have examined the motivations of authors who share URLs, such author-centered intentions are difficult to observe in practice. To enable broader downstream use, this work investigates reader-centered interpretations, i.e., how users perceive the intentions behind hyperlinks included in posts. We develop an intent taxonomy for including hyperlinks in social posts through a hybrid approach that begins with a bottom-up, data-driven process using large-scale crowdsourced annotations, and is then refined using a large language model (LLM) assistance to generate descriptive category names and precise definitions. The final taxonomy comprises 6 top-level categories and 26 fine-grained intention classes, capturing diverse communicative purposes. Applying this taxonomy, we annotate and analyze 1,000 user posts, revealing that advertising, arguing, and sharing are the most prevalent intentions. We further compare our taxonomy with existing taxonomies and demonstrate its utility in a microblog retrieval task by incorporating intent as an additional feature. Overall, our taxonomy provides a foundation for intent-aware information retrieval and NLP applications, enabling more accurate retrieval, recommendation, and interpretation of social media content.
format Preprint
id arxiv_https___arxiv_org_abs_2601_17601
institution arXiv
publishDate 2026
record_format arxiv
spellingShingle Why They Link: An Intent Taxonomy for Including Hyperlinks in Social Posts
Lan, Fangping
Aljebreen, Abdullah
Dragut, Eduard C.
Information Retrieval
Social and Information Networks
URLs serve as bridges between social media platforms and the broader web, linking user-generated content to external information resources. On Twitter (X), approximately one in five tweets contains at least one URL, underscoring their central role in information dissemination. While prior studies have examined the motivations of authors who share URLs, such author-centered intentions are difficult to observe in practice. To enable broader downstream use, this work investigates reader-centered interpretations, i.e., how users perceive the intentions behind hyperlinks included in posts. We develop an intent taxonomy for including hyperlinks in social posts through a hybrid approach that begins with a bottom-up, data-driven process using large-scale crowdsourced annotations, and is then refined using a large language model (LLM) assistance to generate descriptive category names and precise definitions. The final taxonomy comprises 6 top-level categories and 26 fine-grained intention classes, capturing diverse communicative purposes. Applying this taxonomy, we annotate and analyze 1,000 user posts, revealing that advertising, arguing, and sharing are the most prevalent intentions. We further compare our taxonomy with existing taxonomies and demonstrate its utility in a microblog retrieval task by incorporating intent as an additional feature. Overall, our taxonomy provides a foundation for intent-aware information retrieval and NLP applications, enabling more accurate retrieval, recommendation, and interpretation of social media content.
title Why They Link: An Intent Taxonomy for Including Hyperlinks in Social Posts
topic Information Retrieval
Social and Information Networks
url https://arxiv.org/abs/2601.17601