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Geotagging one hundred million Twitter accounts with total variation minimization | IEEE Conference Publication | IEEE Xplore

Geotagging one hundred million Twitter accounts with total variation minimization


Abstract:

Geographically annotated social media is extremely valuable for modern information retrieval. However, when researchers can only access publicly-visible data, one quickly...Show More

Abstract:

Geographically annotated social media is extremely valuable for modern information retrieval. However, when researchers can only access publicly-visible data, one quickly finds that social media users rarely publish location information. In this work, we provide a method which can geolocate the overwhelming majority of active Twitter users, independent of their location sharing preferences, using only publicly-visible Twitter data. Our method infers an unknown user's location by examining their friend's locations. We frame the geotagging problem as an optimization over a social network with a total variation-based objective and provide a scalable and distributed algorithm for its solution. Furthermore, we show how a robust estimate of the geographic dispersion of each user's ego network can be used as a per-user accuracy measure which is effective at removing outlying errors. Leave-many-out evaluation shows that our method is able to infer location for 101, 846, 236 Twitter users at a median error of 6.38 km, allowing us to geotag over 80% of public tweets.
Date of Conference: 27-30 October 2014
Date Added to IEEE Xplore: 08 January 2015
Electronic ISBN:978-1-4799-5666-1
Conference Location: Washington, DC, USA

References

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