Where's @wally?: a classification approach to geolocating users based on their social ties

  • Authors:
  • Dominic Rout;Kalina Bontcheva;Daniel Preoţiuc-Pietro;Trevor Cohn

  • Affiliations:
  • University of Sheffield;University of Sheffield;University of Sheffield;University of Sheffield

  • Venue:
  • Proceedings of the 24th ACM Conference on Hypertext and Social Media
  • Year:
  • 2013

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Abstract

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.