Abstract Along with the increasing requirements, the hashtag recommendation task for microblogs has been receiving considerable attention in recent years. Various researchers have studied the problem from different aspects. However, most of these methods usually need handcrafted features. Motivated by the successful use of convolutional neural networks (CNNs) for many natural language processing tasks, in this paper, we adopt CNNs to perform the hashtag recommendation problem. To incorporate the trigger words whose effectiveness have been experimentally evaluated in several previous works, we propose a novel architecture with an attention mechanism. The results of experiments on the data collected from a real world microblogging service demonstrated that the proposed model outperforms state-of-the-art methods. By incorporating trigger words into the consideration, the relative improvement of the proposed method over the state-of-theart method is around 9.4% in the F1-score.