CSIRO Data61 at the WNUT Geo Shared Task

In this paper, we describe CSIRO Data61’s participation in the Geolocation shared task at the Workshop for Noisy User-generated Text. Our approach was to use ensemble methods to capitalise on four component methods: heuristics based on metadata, a label propagation method, timezone text classifiers, and an information retrieval approach. The ensembles we explored focused on examining the role of language technologies in geolocation prediction and also in examining the use of hard voting and cascading ensemble methods. Based on the accuracy of city-level predictions, our systems were the best performing submissions at this year’s shared task. Furthermore, when estimating the latitude and longitude of a user, our median error distance was accurate to within 30 kilometers.