Fine-grained geolocalisation of non-geotagged tweets

Abstract

The rise in the use of social networks in the recent years has resulted in an abundance of information on different aspects of everyday social activities that is available online, with the most prominent and timely source of such information being Twitter. This has resulted in a proliferation of tools and applications that can help end-users and large-scale event organizers to better plan and manage their activities. In this process of analysis of the information originating from social networks, an important aspect is that of the geographic coordinates, i.e., geolocalisation, of the relevant information, which is necessary for several applications (e.g., on trending venues, traffic jams, etc.). Unfortunately, only a very small percentage of the Twitter posts are geotagged, which significantly restricts the applicability and utility of such applications. In this work, we address this problem by proposing a framework for geolocating tweets that are not geotagged. Our solution is general, and estimates the location from which a post was generated by exploiting the similarities in the content between this post and a set of geotagged tweets, as well as their time-evolution characteristics. Contrary to previous approaches, our framework aims at providing accurate geolocation estimates at fine grain (i.e., within a city). The experimental evaluation with real data demonstrates the efficiency and effectiveness of our approach.