When twitter meets foursquare: Tweet location prediction using foursquare

Abstract

The continued explosion of Twitter data has opened doors for many applications, such as location-based advertisement and entertainment using smartphones. Unfortunately, only about 0.58 percent of tweets are geo-tagged to date. To tackle the location sparseness problem, this paper presents a methodical approach to increasing the number of geotagged tweets by predicting the fine-grained location of those tweets in which their location can be inferred with high confidence. In order to predict the fine-grained location of tweets, we first build probabilistic models for locations using unstructured short messages tightly coupled with semantic locations. Based on the probabilistic models, we propose a 3-step technique (Filtering-Ranking-Validating) for tweet location prediction. In the filtering step, we introduce text analysis techniques to filter out those location-neutral tweets, which may not be related to any location at all. In the ranking step, we utilize ranking techniques to select the best candidate location for a tweet. Finally, in the validating step, we develop a classification-based prediction validation method to verify the location of where the tweet was actually written. We conduct extensive experiments using tweets covering three months and the results show that our approach can increase the number of geo-tagged tweets 4.8 times compared to the original Twitter data and place 34% of predicted tweets within 250m from their actual location.