Predicting Locations in Tweets

Five hundred millions of tweets are posted daily, making Twitter a major social media from which topical information on events can be extracted. Events are represented by time, location and entityrelated information. This paper focuses on location which is an important clue for both users and geo-spatial applications. We address the problem of predicting whether a tweet contains a location or not, as location prediction is a useful pre-processing step for location extraction, by defining a number of features to represent tweets and conducting intensive evaluation of machine learning parameters. We found that: (1) not only words appearing in a geography gazetteer are important but the occurrence of a preposition right before a proper noun also is. (2) it is possible to improve precision on location extraction if the occurrence of a location is predicted.