Towards an Embedding-Based Approach for the Geolocation of Texts and Users on Social Networks

Abstract

The geolocation task of textual data shared on social networks like Twitter attracts a progressive attention. Since those data are supported by advanced geographic information systems for multipurpose spatial analysis, new trends to extend the paradigm of geolocated data become more emergent. Differently from statistical language models that are widely adopted in prior works, the authors propose a new approach that is adopted to the geolocation of both tweets and users through the application of embedding models. The authors boost the geolocation strategy with a sequential modelling using recurrent neural networks to delimit the importance of words in tweets with respect to contextual information. They evaluate the power of this strategy in order to determine locations of unstructured texts that reflect unlimited user's writing styles. Especially, the authors demonstrate that semantic proprieties and word forms can be effective to geolocate texts without specifying local words or topics' descriptions per region.