Multiview Deep Learning for Predicting Twitter Users' Location

Abstract

The problem of predicting the location of users on large social networks like Twitter has emerged from real-life applications such as social unrest detection and online marketing. Twitter user geolocation is a difficult and active research topic with a vast literature. Most of the proposed methods follow either a content-based or a network-based approach. The former exploits user-generated content while the latter utilizes the connection or interaction between Twitter users. In this paper, we introduce a novel method combining the strength of both approaches. Concretely, we propose a multi-entry neural network architecture named MENET leveraging the advances in deep learning and multiview learning. The generalizability of MENET enables the integration of multiple data representations. In the context of Twitter user geolocation, we realize MENET with textual, network, and metadata features. Considering the natural distribution of Twitter users across the concerned geographical area, we subdivide the surface of the earth into multi-scale cells and train MENET with the labels of the cells. We show that our method outperforms the state of the art by a large margin on three benchmark datasets.

Submitted to the IEEE Transactions on Big Data

References in corpus (5)

• Adam: A Method for Stochastic Optimization
• HEALPix -- a Framework for High Resolution Discretization, and Fast Analysis of Data Distributed on the Sphere
• Inductive Representation Learning on Large Graphs
• Near linear time algorithm to detect community structures in large-scale networks
• Geotagging One Hundred Million Twitter Accounts with Total Variation Minimization

Cited by in corpus (9)

• Predictive Analysis on Twitter: Techniques and Applications
• Decoding EEG Brain Activity for Multi-Modal Natural Language Processing
• Graph Convolutional Neural Networks with Node Transition Probability-based Message Passing and DropNode Regularization
• City-level Geolocation of Tweets for Real-time Visual Analytics
• A Practical Guide for the Effective Evaluation of Twitter User Geolocation
• A Hierarchical Location Prediction Neural Network for Twitter User Geolocation
• Fine-grained Geolocation Prediction of Tweets with Human Machine Collaboration
• Rumour Detection via News Propagation Dynamics and User Representation Learning
• Geocoding Without Geotags: A Text-based Approach for reddit