A Probabilistic Geographical Aspect-Opinion Model for Geo-Tagged Microblogs

Due to the rapid increase in the number of users owning location-based devices, there is a considerable amount of geo-tagged data available on social media websites, such as Twitter and Facebook. This geo-tagged data can be useful in a variety of ways to extract location-specific information, as well as to comprehend the variation of information across different geographical regions. A lot of techniques have been proposed for extracting location-based information from social media, but none of these techniques aim to utilize an important characteristic of this data, which is the presence of aspects and their opinions, expressed by the users on these platforms. In this paper, we propose Geographic Aspect Opinion model (GASPOP), a probabilistic model that jointly discovers the variation of aspect and opinion, that correspond to different topics across various geographical regions from geo-tagged social media data. It incorporates the syntactic features of text in the generative process to differentiate aspect and opinion words from general background words. The user-based modeling of topics, also enables it to determine the interest distribution of various users. Furthermore, our model can be used to predict the location of different tweets based on their text. We evaluated our model on Twitter data, and our experimental results show that GASPOP can jointly discover latent aspect and opinion words for different topics across latent geographical regions. Moreover, a quantitative analysis of GASPOP using widely used evaluation metrics shows that it outperforms the state-of-the-art methods.