A Survey of Location Prediction on Twitter

Locations, e.g., countries, states, cities, and point-of-interests, are central to news, emergency events, and people's daily lives. Automatic identification of locations associated with or mentioned in documents has been explored for decades. As one of the most popular online social network platforms, Twitter has attracted a large number of users who send millions of tweets on daily basis. Due to the world-wide coverage of its users and real-time freshness of tweets, location prediction on Twitter has gained significant attention in recent years. Research efforts are spent on dealing with new challenges and opportunities brought by the noisy, short, and context-rich nature of tweets. In this survey, we aim at offering an overall picture of location prediction on Twitter. Specifically, we concentrate on the prediction of user home locations, tweet locations, and mentioned locations. We first define the three tasks and review the evaluation metrics. By summarizing Twitter network, tweet content, and tweet context as potential inputs, we then structurally highlight how the problems depend on these inputs. Each dependency is illustrated by a comprehensive review of the corresponding strategies adopted in state-of-the-art approaches. In addition, we also briefly review two related problems, i.e., semantic location prediction and point-of-interest recommendation. Finally, we list future research directions.Comment: Accepted to TKDE. 30 pages, 1 figur

A Transformer-based Framework for POI-level Social Post Geolocation

POI-level geo-information of social posts is critical to many location-based applications and services. However, the multi-modality, complexity and diverse nature of social media data and their platforms limit the performance of inferring such fine-grained locations and their subsequent applications. To address this issue, we present a transformer-based general framework, which builds upon pre-trained language models and considers non-textual data, for social post geolocation at the POI level. To this end, inputs are categorized to handle different social data, and an optimal combination strategy is provided for feature representations. Moreover, a uniform representation of hierarchy is proposed to learn temporal information, and a concatenated version of encodings is employed to capture feature-wise positions better. Experimental results on various social datasets demonstrate that three variants of our proposed framework outperform multiple state-of-art baselines by a large margin in terms of accuracy and distance error metrics.Comment: Full papers are 12 pages in length plus additional 4 pages for references (turns to 18 pages in total after submitting to arxiv). One figure and 5 tables are contained. This paper was submitted to ECIR 2023 for revie

A Hierarchical Location Prediction Neural Network for Twitter User Geolocation

Accurate estimation of user location is important for many online services. Previous neural network based methods largely ignore the hierarchical structure among locations. In this paper, we propose a hierarchical location prediction neural network for Twitter user geolocation. Our model first predicts the home country for a user, then uses the country result to guide the city-level prediction. In addition, we employ a character-aware word embedding layer to overcome the noisy information in tweets. With the feature fusion layer, our model can accommodate various feature combinations and achieves state-of-the-art results over three commonly used benchmarks under different feature settings. It not only improves the prediction accuracy but also greatly reduces the mean error distance.Comment: Accepted by EMNLP 201