Where Is This Tweet From? Inferring Home Locations of Twitter Users

We present a new algorithm for inferring the home locations of Twitter users at different granularities, such as city, state, or time zone, using the content of their tweets and their tweeting behavior. Unlike existing approaches, our algo rithm uses an ensemble of statistical and heuristic classifiers to predict locations. We find that a hierarchical classifica tion approach can improve prediction accuracy. Experi mental evidence suggests that our algorithm works well in practice and outperforms the best existing algorithms for predicting the location of Twitter users.