HisRect: Features from Historical Visits and Recent Tweet for Co-Location Judgement

This study explores the problem of co-location judgement, i.e., to decide whether two Twitter users are co-located at some point-of-interest (POI). We extract novel features, named HisRect, from users’ historical visits and recent tweets: The former has impact on where a user visits in general, whereas the latter gives more hints about where a user is currently. To alleviate the issue of data scarcity, a semi-supervised learning (SSL) framework is designed to extract HisRect features. Moreover, we use an embedding neural network layer to decide co-location based on the difference between two users’ His-Rect features. Extensive experiments on real Twitter data suggest that our HisRect features and SSL framework are highly effective at deciding co-locations.