The information on the page says this is directly related to counting #hashtags, and not any natural language analysis. I do not know if normalization would he

The information on the page says this is directly related to counting #hashtags, and not any natural language analysis. I do not know if normalization would help in this instance as people are taking a deliberate action in hash-tagging with the related feeling. I've done some sentiment analysis and relationship/influence mapping on twitter data and the 140 character limit often means you have to create a specialized training set for your classifiers based on the group of people you are targeting. Simply weighting existing training sets offer very small benefits in accuracy.