Exploiting Text and Network Context for Geolocation of Social Media Users

Understand

Research on automatically geolocating social media users has conventionally been based on the text content of posts from a given user or the social network of the user, with very little crossover between the two, and no bench-marking of the two approaches over compara- ble datasets.

• We bring the two threads of research together in first proposing a text-based method based on adaptive grids, followed by a hybrid network- and text-based method.
• Evaluating over three Twitter datasets, we show that the empirical difference between text- and network-based methods is not great, and that hybridisation of the two is superior to the component methods, especially in contexts where the user graph is not well connected.
• We achieve state-of-the-art results on all three datasets.