Location Inference for Non-Geotagged Tweets in User Timelines

Authors:
Publisher website
Google Scholar
Abstract
As social media users are increasingly going mobile, various location based services (LBS) have been deployed on social media like Twitter. The success of them heavily depends on the availability and accuracy of users' location information. However, only a small fraction of tweets are geo-tagged. Thus, it is necessary to infer locations for tweets in order to attain the purpose of LBS. In this paper, we tackle this problem by scrutinizing Twitter user timelines. First, we split each user's tweet timeline temporally into a number of clusters, each tending to imply a distinct location. Subsequently, we adapt two machine learning models and design classifiers that classify each tweet cluster into one of the pre-defined location classes at the city level. The Bayes based model focuses on the information gain of words with location implications in the user-generated contents. The convolutional LSTM model treats user-generated contents and their associated locations as sequences and employs bidirectional LSTM and convolution operation to infer locations. The two models are evaluated on a large real data set. The results suggest that our models are effective at inferring locations for non-geotagged tweets and the models outperform the state-of-the-art and alternative approaches significantly in terms of inference accuracy.
Funding Information
  • National Natural Science Foundation of China (61772460)
  • National Key Research and Development Plan (2016YFB1001200)
  • Zhejiang Provincial Natural Science Foundation of China (LR15F020001)

This publication has 42 references indexed in Scilit: