The geolocation of online information is an essential component in any geospatial application. While most of the previous work on geolocation has focused on Twitter, in this paper we quantify and compare the performance of text-based geolocation methods on social media data drawn from both Blogger and Twitter. We introduce a novel set of location specific features that are both highly informative and easily interpretable, and show that we can achieve error rate reductions of up to 12.5 with respect to the best previously proposed geolocation features. We also show that despite posting longer text, Blogger users are significantly harder to geolocate than Twitter users. Additionally, we investigate the effect of training and testing on different media (cross-media predictions), or combining multiple social media sources (multi-media predictions). Finally, we explore the geolocability of social media in relation to three user dimensions: state, gender, and industry.
Previous work has verified that simple generative models with appropriate feature engineering can indeed outperform more sophisticated methods @cite_35 @cite_10 , including deep learning @cite_19 Some of the most recent deep learning attempts yield promising performance @cite_0 @cite_44 , but these results are inherently more challenging to analyze and interpret, more expensive to acquire (computationally, time-wise as well as optimizing the architecture) and neural nets are extremely data hungry (customarily requiring millions of examples) making them less attractive in qualitative studies especially when targeting text from social media that are less prevalent than Twitter where data is not so abundant. . In this paper, we adopt this guideline and introduce new feature weighting and selection methods that improve both the accuracy and effectiveness of geolocation algorithms. Furthermore, unlike most previous research, we target both a blogging and a microblogging platform, and examine individual, mixed and cross-media geolocation performance.
@cite_35 @cite_44 @cite_19 @cite_0 @cite_10
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Building upon recent Deep Neural Network architectures, current approaches lying in the intersection of computer vision and natural language processing have achieved unprecedented breakthroughs in tasks like automatic captioning or image retrieval. Most of these learning methods, though, rely on large training sets of images associated with human annotations that specifically describe the visual content. In this paper we propose to go a step further and explore the more complex cases where textual descriptions are loosely related to the images. We focus on the particular domain of News articles in which the textual content often expresses connotative and ambiguous relations that are only suggested but not directly inferred from images. We introduce new deep learning methods that address source detection, popularity prediction, article illustration and geolocation of articles. An adaptive CNN architecture is proposed, that shares most of the structure for all the tasks, and is suitable for multitask and transfer learning. Deep Canonical Correlation Analysis is deployed for article illustration, and a new loss function based on Great Circle Distance is proposed for geolocation. Furthermore, we present BreakingNews, a novel dataset with approximately 100K news articles including images, text and captions, and enriched with heterogeneous meta-data (such as GPS coordinates and popularity metrics). We show this dataset to be appropriate to explore all aforementioned problems, for which we provide a baseline performance using various Deep Learning architectures, and different representations of the textual and visual features. We report very promising results and bring to light several limitations of current state-of-the-art in this kind of domain, which we hope will help spur progress in the field. 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. Recently, neuron activations extracted from a pre-trained convolutional neural network (CNN) show promising performance in various visual tasks. However, due to the domain and task bias, using the features generated from the model pre-trained for image classification as image representations for instance retrieval is problematic. In this paper, we propose quartet-net learning to improve the discriminative power of CNN features for instance retrieval. The general idea is to map the features into a space where the image similarity can be better evaluated. Our network differs from the traditional Siamese-net in two ways. First, we adopt a double-margin contrastive loss with a dynamic margin tuning strategy to train the network which leads to more robust performance. Second, we introduce in the mimic learning regularization to improve the generalization ability of the network by preventing it from overfitting to the training data. Catering for the network learning, we collect a large-scale dataset, namely GeoPair, which consists of 68k matching image pairs and 63k non-matching pairs. Experiments on several standard instance retrieval datasets demonstrate the effectiveness of our method. Inferring the location of a user has been a valuable step for many applications that leverage social media, such as marketing, security monitoring and recommendation systems. Motivated by the recent success of Deep Learning techniques for many other tasks such as computer vision, speech recognition, and natural language processing, we study the application of neural networks to the problem of geolocation prediction and experiment with multiple techniques to improve neural networks for geolocation inference based solely on text. Experimental results on three Twitter datasets suggest that choosing appropriate network architecture, activation function, and performing Batch Normalization, can all increase performance on this task.