Geographically annotated social media is extremely valuable for modern information retrieval. However, when researchers can only access publicly-visible data, one quickly finds that social media users rarely publish location information. In this work, we provide a method which can geolocate the overwhelming majority of active Twitter users, independent of their location sharing preferences, using only publicly-visible Twitter data. Our method infers an unknown user's location by examining their friend's locations. We frame the geotagging problem as an optimization over a social network with a total variation-based objective and provide a scalable and distributed algorithm for its solution. Furthermore, we show how a robust estimate of the geographic dispersion of each user's ego network can be used as a per-user accuracy measure which is effective at removing outlying errors. Leave-many-out evaluation shows that our method is able to infer location for 101, 846, 236 Twitter users at a median error of 6.38 km, allowing us to geotag over 80 of public tweets.
Large-scale language-agnostic geotagging is possible by inferring a user's location with the known locations of their friends. Influential work in this field was conducted at Facebook Inc. in @cite_13 . Here, the authors infer a user's home address with a maximum likelihood estimate that best fits an empirically observed power law. Surprisingly, the results of @cite_13 indicate that social network based methods are accurate than IP-based geolocation. Since the IP addresses of Twitter users are never public, and our research involves public data alone, we can not report any results about how the present work compares against IP-based Twitter geolocation.
@cite_13
2021278340 2296740734 2057817918 27793324
Geographically annotated social media is extremely valuable for modern information retrieval. However, when researchers can only access publicly-visible data, one quickly finds that social media users rarely publish location information. In this work, we provide a method which can geolocate the overwhelming majority of active Twitter users, independent of their location sharing preferences, using only publicly-visible Twitter data. Our method infers an unknown user's location by examining their friend's locations. We frame the geotagging problem as an optimization over a social network with a total variation-based objective and provide a scalable and distributed algorithm for its solution. Furthermore, we show how a robust estimate of the geographic dispersion of each user's ego network can be used as a per-user accuracy measure which is effective at removing outlying errors. Leave-many-out evaluation shows that our method is able to infer location for 101, 846, 236 Twitter users at a median error of 6.38 km, allowing us to geotag over 80 of public tweets. Geographic locations of users form an important axis in public polls and localized advertising, but are not available by default. The number of users who make their locations public or use GPS tagging is relatively small, compared to the huge number of users in online social networking services and social media platforms. In this work we propose a new framework to infer a user's main location of activities in Twitter using their textual contents. Our approach is based on a probabilistic generative model that filters local words, employs data binning for scalability, and applies a map projection technique for performance. For Korean Twitter users, we report that 60 of users are identified within 10 km of their locations, a significant improvement over existing approaches. This paper presents an approach to geolocating users of online social networks, based solely on their 'friendship' connections. We observe that users interact more regularly with those closer to themselves and hypothesise that, in many cases, a person's social network is sufficient to reveal their location. The geolocation problem is formulated as a classification task, where the most likely city for a user without an explicit location is chosen amongst the known locations of their social ties. Our method uses an SVM classifier and a number of features that reflect different aspects and characteristics of Twitter user networks. The SVM classifier is trained and evaluated on a dataset of Twitter users with known locations. Our method outperforms a state-of-the-art method for geolocating users based on their social ties. With the availability of cheap location sensors, geotagging of messages in online social networks is proliferating. For instance, Twitter, Facebook, Foursquare, and Google+ provide these services both explicitly by letting users choose their location or implicitly via a sensor. This paper presents an integrated generative model of location and message content. That is, we provide a model for combining distributions over locations, topics, and over user characteristics, both in terms of location and in terms of their content preferences. Unlike previous work which modeled data in a flat pre-defined representation, our model automatically infers both the hierarchical structure over content and over the size and position of geographical locations. This affords significantly higher accuracy --- location uncertainty is reduced by 40 relative to the best previous results [21] achieved on location estimation from Tweets. We achieve this goal by proposing a new statistical model, the nested Chinese Restaurant Franchise (nCRF), a hierarchical model of tree distributions. Much statistical structure is shared between users. That said, each user has his own distribution over interests and places. The use of the nCRF allows us to capture the following effects: (1) We provide a topic model for Tweets; (2) We obtain location specific topics; (3) We infer a latent distribution of locations; (4) We provide a joint hierarchical model of topics and locations; (5) We infer personalized preferences over topics and locations within the above model. In doing so, we are both able to obtain accurate estimates of the location of a user based on his tweets and to obtain a detailed estimate of a geographical language model.