Media Engineering and Technology Faculty

German University in Cairo

Location Detection Over Social

Media

Bachelor Thesis

Author: Ahmed Soliman

Supervisors: Sarah Elkasrawy

Submission Date: XX July, 20XX

 Media Engineering and Technology Faculty
German University in Cairo

Location Detection Over Social

Media

Bachelor Thesis

Author: Ahmed Soliman

Supervisors: Sarah Elkasrawy

Submission Date: XX July, 20XX

This is to certify that:

(i) the thesis comprises only my original work toward the Bachelor Degree

(ii) due acknowlegement has been made in the text to all other material used

Ahmed Soliman
XX July, 20XX
Acknowledgments

Text

V
VI
Abstract

Abstact

VII
VIII
Contents

Acknowledgments V

1 Introduction 1
1.1 Motivation . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 1
1.2 Aim . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 1
1.3 Outline . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 2

2 Related Work 3
2.1 Non-Content-Based Location Estimation . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 3
2.2 Content-Based Location Estimation . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 4

3 Data 5
3.1 Dataset Overview . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 5
3.2 Data Analysis . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 5
3.2.1 Geographical Analysis . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 5
3.2.2 Language Analysis . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 6
3.3 Ground Truth Data . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 7

4 Location Detection Approaches 9

4.1 Profile location identification . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 9
4.2 Location detection by language . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 9
4.3 Location Detection by Machine Learning . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 10
4.3.1 Heuristic-Based Approach . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 10
4.3.2 Information Theory-Based Approach . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 11

5 Conclusion 13

6 Future Work 15

Appendix 16

A Lists 17
List of Abbreviations . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 17
List of Figures . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 18

IX
References 19

X
Chapter 1

Introduction

1.1 Motivation
Micro-blogging services such as Twitter, Facebook and Tumblr have been growing and ris-
ing rapidly recently, As of March 2013, 400 million tweets were being posted everyday[8].
This has initiated enormous research efforts to mine this data and use them in various
applications, such as event detection [Sakaki et al. 2010; Agarwal et al. 2012] and news
recommendation [Phelan et al. 2009]. Many applications could make use of informa-
tion about users locations, but unfortunately the information is very sparse, a research
firm Sysomos studied Twitter usage between mid-October and mid-December 2009 and
found that only 0.23% of tweets in that time period were geo-tagged which is a good
indicator how much this information is sparse. Although blogging services allow users to
specify their location in their profiles, the profile location field is not reliable, Cheng et
al. found that only 26% out of a random sample of over 1 million Twitter users revealed
their city-level location in their profiles and only 0.42% of the tweets in this dataset were
geo-tagged [Cheng et al. 2010]. Moreover these profile locations are not always valid
as reported that only 42% of Twitter users in a random dataset have reported a valid
city-level location in their profiles [Hecht et al 2011].

1.2 Aim
In this paper users location prediction approaches are discussed to overcome location
sparseness problem mentioned above. These approaches are based purely on the tweets
content and tweeting behaviour in the absence of any other location information. The
goal is to develop approaches that will be able to predict the location of the tweet, the
key step towards achieving this goal is to predict the home location of the user as the
home location can give important clues to the possible actual location of the tweet. The
intuition here is that the content of a tweet may contain some words, entity names or
phrases more likely to be employed in particular places than others which could give

1
2 CHAPTER 1. INTRODUCTION

indicators for the actual location. Developing these approaches to be able to predict
possible locations of a tweet will be very beneficial in tracking applications such as news
verification in which we want to know which tweets are reported by users who are likely
to be in the actual location of an event or versus tweets reported by users who are likely
to be far away.

1.3 Outline
In the remainder of this paper related work, data set, formalization of the location pre-
diction problem, location classification approaches, and an evaluation of discussed algo-
rithms and approaches are discussed. Then the conclusion comes with a discussion of
future work.
Chapter 2

Related Work

This chapter shows a variety of prior work that is related to this study, the prior studies
can be categorized into the following areas:

2.1 Non-Content-Based Location Estimation

There are many studies that explored estimating users location based on information
provided in users profile, geo-tagged tweets and other social information.
A number of studies make use of location information provided in users Twitter profiles,
for example Kulshrestha et al. [2012][8] have used location information provided by users
in their profile and map APIs to estimate the country level location, they were able to
estimate country level location for about 23.5% of users with 94.7% accuracy. However
the location prediction techniques that rely on information provided by users are not
always reliable because map APIs do not always return correct results. In addition, users
do not enter correct information most of the time, for example Hecht et al. reported that
34% of users either enter incorrect non-geographic information in the location field or
leave the field empty.
Other studies make use of GPS coordinates provided by users mobile devices, however
the number of geotagged tweets is not large so we can rely on as reported by Cheng et al.
[2010] that the prportion of geotagged tweets is arround 1% and the location of majority
of users are not geotagged. Some Methods based on IP addresses are used by other studies
like (Buyukokkten, Cho, Garcia-Molina, Gravano, & Shivakumar, 1999). These methods
have been shown to achieve arround 90% accuracy at locating Internet hosts to their
locations as reported by Padmanabhan Subramanian [2001] [9]. However these methods
are not applicable to Twitter and other socal media services as geographical divisions
of IP adresses are not always valid. For example, some departments in an international
corporation might use the same IP addresses and their true locations are spreading across
the world. Another example, users who use VPNs could be assigned IP addresses from
different locations other than their true locations.

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4 CHAPTER 2. RELATED WORK

Some studies use other social information to infere location of users, for example Popescu
and Grefenstette[10] tried to estimate the home country of Flicker users using place names
and coordinate provided with their photos, Backstrom et al. [2] presented an algorithm
to predict the physical location of a user using the social network structure of Facebook,
given the known locatiion of users friends they were able to locate 69.1% of the users
with 16 or more located friends to within 25 miles compared to only 57.2% using IP-based
methods.

2.2 Content-Based Location Estimation

Content of users tweets has been exploited to extract users location, for example if a
place is frequently mentioned in users tweet he is likely tweeting from that place. There
are some methods that are based on that intuition such as naive gazetteer matching
(Bilhaut, Charnois, Enjalbert, Mathet, 2003)[3] and named entity recognition as well as
vocabulary-based method to identify location name from tweets (Agarwal et al. [2012])[1].
A number of methods have been proposed to estimate the home location of users based
on content analysis of tweets. These methods build probabilistic models from tweet
content, for example Eisenstein et al. [2011][6] reported 58% accuracy for predicting
regions (4 regions) and 24% accuracy for predicting states (48 continental US states and
the District of Columbia) using geographic topic models for prediction.
For estimating city-level location it becomes more challenging than location estimation
for higher levels, because the number of cities in dataset is often larger that the number of
states, regions or countries, Cheng et al[2010][5] described a city-level location estimation
algorithm in which local words are identified in tweets (such as red sox is local to Boston)
and statistical models are build from them. However their method was not promising as
it needs manual selection of such local words to train a supervised classification model.
In addition they reported approximately 51% accuracy using their approach. Chang et
al. [2012] [4] recently described another content based location estimation using Gaussian
Mixture Model (GMM) and Maximum Likelihood Estimation (MLE) and reported 50%
accuracy in predicting city-level location within 100 miles of actual city-location which is
comparable to Cheng et al [2010].
Chapter 3

Data

3.1 Dataset Overview

In experiments conducted in this thesis, a dataset collected analyzed by Benjamin Bischke
have been used [?]. This dataset was collected from Decahouse-Streaming API represent-
ing about ten percent of random public tweets over all activities on Twitter during the
period 2016-01-15 till 2016-02-06.
The dataset consists of around 1 Billion activities divided as follows: 47.16% are new
posts, 30.23% are shared content of retweets and the remaining 22.6% are deletion of
tweets.

3.2 Data Analysis

Geolocation prediction models presented have primarily been trained and evaluated using
geotagged tweets, geotagged tweets are filtered based on languages when conducting
different experiments. In this section geographic and language analysis for tweets used
will be presented.

3.2.1 Geographical Analysis

Twitter give users the option to embed their current GPS-location. The dataset included
only about 2.1% (16,874,517) of the activities with embedded precise GPS-location. On
the other hand geographical information can be inffered indirectly from profile location
field in users profile, but as noticed this geographical information is not reliable as only
43.1% of unique users profiles included non empty profile location field. In addition about
half of these non empty profile location fields were successfully mapped to a real locations
as the other half contained non valid existing locations and in some cases valid but non

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6 CHAPTER 3. DATA

complete addresses which is hard to map to a unique locations like state or country
names.

By extracting GPS-coordinates from users profiles and mapping it to countries we can

see the distribution of geo-locations of tweets, Fig 3.1 shows the top 10 countries extracted
from the dataset.

3.2.2 Language Analysis

Researches previously conducted have been primarily focused on English data or have
been used datasets that consisted of primarily English tweets.However, Twitter is a multi-
lingual platform and including some languages may help in the task of location prediction
as it can be powerful indicator for locations, for example, if a user tweets mostly in Chi-
nese, this could be an indicator that the user is from China.

For the analysis of languages used in tweets, a language detector was applied, Figure
3.2 shows the top 10 most frequently used languages in the dataset.

Country Distribution based on GPS- Information

All Other Countries : 25.59 %

United States : 29.76 %
All Other Countries : 25.59 %
United States : 29.76 %

Spain : 2.16 %
Malaysia : 2.45 %
Spain : 2.16 %
Indonesia : 2.49 %
Malaysia : 2.45 %
Philippines : 3.09 %
Indonesia : 2.49 %
Turkey : 3.51 %
Philippines : 3.09 % Brasil : 14.49 %
United Kindom : 4.62 %
Turkey : 3.51 %
Japan : 5.26 % Brasil : 14.49 %
Argentina : 6.58 %
United Kindom : 4.62 %
United States Brasil Argentina
Japan : 5.26 % Japan United Kindom
Argentina : 6.58 % Turkey
Philippines Indonesia Malaysia Spain All Other Countries
Fig. 3.1 This pie chart shows the top-10 countries determined by GPS information.
meta-chart.com
3.3. GROUND TRUTH DATA 7

Language Distribution Based on Language Dtector

All Othe r Language s : 7 .2 %

T hai : 2.1 %
All Othe r Language s : 7 .2 %
T urkish : 2.2 %
T hai : 2.1 %
Fre nch : 2.6 %
T urkish : 2.2 %
Indone sian : 3.1 % English : 36.5 %
Fre nch : 2.6 %
Kore an : 3.2 %
Indone sian : 3.1 % English : 36.5 %
Arabic : 6.3 %
Kore an : 3.2 %

Arabic : 6.3 %

Portugue se : 6.6 %

Portugue se : 6.6 %

Spanish : 10.4 %

Spanish : 10.4 % Japane se : 19.8 %

English Japanese Spanish Japane se : 19.8 %Arabic

Portuguese Korean
Indonesian French Turkish Thai All Other Languages
Fig. 3.2 This pie chart shows the top-10 most frequently used languages.meta-chart.com

3.3 Ground Truth Data

To conduct experiments presented in Chapter 4, The dataset mentioned in previous sec-
tions have been filtered. Geotagged post activities only have been used to train prediction
models, so from total of 16,874,517 geotagged activities a sample of around 13.9% of it
(2,350,906) have been chosen to be used as ground truth data.
This sample included only post activities, and by extracting GPS-coordinates from users
profiles and mapping it to countries we managed to get the distribution of geo-locations
of tweets in the sample, Fig 3.3 shows the top 10 countries extracted from the sample.
The sample also covered many languages as some experiments in chapter 4 use tweets in
various languages. Fig 3.4 shows the top 10 frequently used languages in sample tweets.
8 CHAPTER 3. DATA
Chapter 4

Location Detection Approaches

4.1 Profile location identification

The first naive approach is to get the location of the user by checking the profile location
field included in users profile, but as we discussed before this data is not always reliable
for some reasons such as: 1) Profile fields contain non valid locations, for example phrases
to express a desire for keeping that information private, jokes, sexual content and even
expressions that indicate how much a user hate his current location[Hecht et al 2011] 2)
profile fields could be completely empty 3) some fields contain valid but not complete
addresses like state name or country name only.

4.2 Location detection by language

Social media applications give users the free choice to publish their status updates and
tweets. Language can be a strong indicator of location: for example a user that writes
tweets in Chinese is most probably located in China, but the problem is there are lan-
guages that are spoken in many locations around the world such as English which is
spoken by 67 countries as an official language[8]. So the prediction based on language
is not accurate enough to get the country where the tweet was published but a list of
possible locations (country level) could be obtained by mapping Languages to countries
speaking this language as an official or second language[10], Then by classifying the lan-
guage of the tweet, a list of countries that speak this language can be obtained. The
problem with this approach is the list could be large and contains irrelevant countries.

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10 CHAPTER 4. LOCATION DETECTION APPROACHES

4.3 Location Detection by Machine Learning

Machine learning can be used to detect location of tweet based purely on its content.
Classifier for city level location detection have been implemented. Each tweet in our
training dataset corresponds to a training example and the corresponding output is the
geolocation provided with that tweet. The number of classes in the trained models equal
to the total number of locations (cities) in our training dataset.
To train a classifier on tweets content, the words contained in these tweets should be
ranked according to their location indicativeness which defines how much a word is associ-
ated with particular location. In the next two sections we present two different approaches
to rank the words to get feature set.

4.3.1 Heuristic-Based Approach

In this approach a simple heuristic algorithm which is called CALGARI[2] is used. This
algorithm is based on intuition that a model will perform better if it is trained on words
that are more likely to be used by some users from particular regions than users from
the general population. a score for each term is calculated then the words are ranked
according to this score. In mathematical words the score for each term is defined as the
maximum conditional probability of the word given a class from all classes set (cities)
over the probability of the word.
We will explain how this score is calculated below:
First Let score(W) be a function which takes a word and calculate the score for that
word W, f (W) be the frequency of a word W in our dataset, count(W, c) be a function
that count how many times the word W appeared with class c, S is the set of all words
in our dataset and C be the set of all classes (city locations) in our dataset, The score for
each word is calculated as follows:
max(P (W| c = C))
score(W) = where c C
P(W)

Where P(W) is the probability of the presence of word and is calculated as the frequency
f (T )
of the word over the total number of words. P(W) = , and P (W| c) is the conditional
|S|
probability of the presence of word W given some class c and is calculated as the number
of times word W appeared with class c over the total number of all words occurrences
with class c.
C count(W, ci )
, so max(P (W| c = C)) is evaluated as max P
i
count(tj , ci )
j

Now after calculating a score for each word, the algorithm sorts the words according to
the calculated score in non-decreasing order. In chapter 6 we discuss the effect of using
top-n% of the feature set generated using this algorithm.
4.3. LOCATION DETECTION BY MACHINE LEARNING 11

4.3.2 Information Theory-Based Approach

In addition to Heuristic method mentioned in previous section, we also discuss an information-

theoretic feature selection method as it proved to be efficient in text classification tasks,
e.g., Information Gain (IG) (Yang Pedersen, 1997). In addition it was reported that
using this method the best results in location detection task is achieved [7].

First lets define two important terms, the first one is Information Gain (IG). The In-
formation Gain is the difference in class (location) entropy due to data split on some
attribute (word), so the higher the value the greater the predictability of the word, so
given a set of all words in our training set S, the IG of a word W S across all classes
(cities) C is calculated as follows:

IG(W) = H(c) H(c|W)

H(c|W)
X X
P(W) P (c | W) log P (c | W) + P(W) P (c | W) log P (c | W)
c C c C

where P(W) and P(W) is the probability of the presence and absence of word W, respec-
tively, P (c | W) and P (c | W) is the conditional probability of class c when word W is
present and absent respectively. Because H(c) is constant over all words, so to rank the
features only the conditional entropy given word W needs to be calculated.

The second term we need to mention is the Intrinsic Value (IV), local words occur-
ring in a small number of cities usually have low intrinsic value, where non-local words
have high intrinsic value, so when the words are comparable in IG values, words with
smaller intrinsic value should be preferred because it means that the words are more
locally employed (location indicative).

IV (W) = P(W) log P(W) P(W) log P(W)

Now with the two terms mentioned above, Information Gain Ratio (IGR) is defined as
the ratio between information gain to the intrinsic value.

IG(W)
IGR((W) =
IV (W)
12 CHAPTER 4. LOCATION DETECTION APPROACHES
Chapter 5

Conclusion

Conclusion

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14 CHAPTER 5. CONCLUSION
Chapter 6

Future Work

Text

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Appendix

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Appendix A

Lists

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List of Figures

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[10] Adrian Popescu, Gregory Grefenstette, et al. Mining user home location and gender
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