You are where you tweet: a content-based approach to geo-locating twitter users

  • Authors:

  • Zhiyuan Cheng;James Caverlee;Kyumin Lee

  • Affiliations:

  • Texas A&M University, College Station, TX, USA;Texas A&M University, College Station, TX, USA;Texas A&M University, College Station, TX, USA

  • Venue:
  • CIKM '10 Proceedings of the 19th ACM international conference on Information and knowledge management
  • Year:
  • 2010

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Abstract

We propose and evaluate a probabilistic framework for estimating a Twitter user's city-level location based purely on the content of the user's tweets, even in the absence of any other geospatial cues. By augmenting the massive human-powered sensing capabilities of Twitter and related microblogging services with content-derived location information, this framework can overcome the sparsity of geo-enabled features in these services and enable new location-based personalized information services, the targeting of regional advertisements, and so on. Three of the key features of the proposed approach are: (i) its reliance purely on tweet content, meaning no need for user IP information, private login information, or external knowledge bases; (ii) a classification component for automatically identifying words in tweets with a strong local geo-scope; and (iii) a lattice-based neighborhood smoothing model for refining a user's location estimate. The system estimates k possible locations for each user in descending order of confidence. On average we find that the location estimates converge quickly (needing just 100s of tweets), placing 51% of Twitter users within 100 miles of their actual location.