2.7 4.

Article

Find You: Multi-View-Based

Location Inference for Twitter Users

Huixin Wu, Jiahui Li, Shuqing Li, Hanbing Li, Jiangtao Ma and Yaqiong Qiao

https://doi.org/10.3390/app132111848
 applied
sciences
Article
Find You: Multi-View-Based Location Inference for
Twitter Users
Huixin Wu 1 , Jiahui Li 1, *, Shuqing Li 1 , Hanbing Li 2 , Jiangtao Ma 2,3
Citation: Wu, H.; Li, J.; Li, S.; Li, H.;
Ma, J.; Qiao, Y. Find You: Multi-View-
Based Location Inference for Twitter
Users. Appl. Sci. 2023, 13, 11848.
https://doi.org/10.3390/
app132111848
Academic Editor: Giacomo Fiumara
Received: 11 October 2023
Revised: 28 October 2023
Accepted: 29 October 2023
Published: 30 October 2023
Copyright: © 2023 by the authors.
Licensee MDPI, Basel, Switzerland.
This article is an open access article
distributed under the terms and
conditions of the Creative Commons
Attribution (CC BY) license (https://
creativecommons.org/licenses/by/
4.0/).
Appl. Sci. 2023, 13, 11848. https://doi.org/10.3390/app132111848
and Yaqiong Qiao 1,4, *
1 School of Information Engineering, North China University of Water Resources and Electric Power,
Zhengzhou 450046, China; wuhuixin@ncwu.edu.cn (H.W.); lishuqing@stu.ncwu.edu.cn (S.L.)
2 Songshan Laboratory, Zhengzhou 450000, China; anatoly-li@foxmail.com (H.L.);
majiangtao@zzuli.edu.cn (J.M.)
3 College of Computer and Communication Engineering, Zhengzhou University of Light Industry,
Zhengzhou 450002, China
4 Henan Key Laboratory of Cyberspace Situation Awareness, Zhengzhou 450001, China
* Correspondence: lijiahuiymz@gmai.com (J.L.); kitesmile@126.com(Y.Q.)
Abstract: Location information on Twitter plays a critical role in emergency detection, event recom-
mendation, and disaster warning. However, only a limited amount of Twitter data are geotagged.
Previous research has presented various models for inferring location based on text, social relations,
and contextual data, yielding highly promising results. Nonetheless, these existing methods have
certain limitations that need to be addressed. Firstly, most of the existing methods overlook the role
of local celebrities (well-known users in the local community) as indicators of location within the
social network. Secondly, they fail to consider the associations between words in tweets, resulting
in insufficiently rich features extracted from the tweets. We propose a multi-view-based location
inference model called MVGeo to overcome these limitations. In the network view, our approach
employs the Gaussian Mixture Model (GMM) to identify and retain local celebrities, thereby strength-
ening user location associations. In the tweet view, we construct a heterogeneous graph based on the
co-occurrence relationship between words in tweets and the user’s mentioned relationship with the
words. This allows us to fully leverage the local correlation between words and the global correlation
to extract tweet features more comprehensively. Finally, we employ a modified multi-layer graph
convolutional network, called Gate-GCN, to fuse the network and tweet information. This expansion
of the feature space enables us to extract sample features from multiple perspectives. To demonstrate
the effectiveness of MVGeo, we conduct exhaustive experimental evaluations on a publicly available
dataset and compare its performance against several state-of-the-art benchmark models. The results
confirm the superior performance of the proposed model.
Keywords: Twitter user localization; social information fusion; graph neural network; semi-supervised
learning; word co-occurrence
1. Introduction
Users can share brief updates about their activities on social platforms, acting as social
sensors and disseminating information about local events. As a virtual online social plat-
form, Twitter generates millions of tweets daily that contain explicit or implicit information
about users’ locations, bridging the virtual and physical worlds. These location data are
utilized in a variety of applications, including event detection [1] and location-based rec-
ommendations [2]. Users rarely reveal their geographic locations on social platforms due
to privacy protection restrictions, despite the diverse applications of user location data. For
instance, only 5% of Twitter users include their home locations in their profile [3], and only
1% of tweets are geotagged [4]. Therefore, research on location-based inference methods
for Twitter users is an urgent matter. Early research centered on extracting location signals
from users’ media posts, such as location-related vocabulary and linguistic patterns. Word
https://www.mdpi.com/journal/applsci
Appl. Sci. 2023, 13, 11848 2 of 14

distribution comparison [5,6] and location-indicative word extraction [7,8] are representa-
tive text-based techniques. In addition, social networks extracted from user interactions
online can disclose the distance between users. To process network structure data, the
majority of network-based methods employ label propagation or node embedding [9,10].
Recent hybrid approaches [11,12] have emerged that combine text and network features to
infer user locations, leveraging the strengths of both approaches and achieving improved
performance. Despite the satisfactory results of previous work, there are still some things
that need to be improved to address: (1) Highly mentioned users (celebrities) in social
networks are categorized as local celebrities (well-known users in the local community) and
global celebrities (well-known users worldwide). Since celebrity users in social networks
form many connections but rarely carry location information, existing methods remove
celebrity users by setting a threshold to prevent them from negatively affecting location
inference [13,14]. However, they do not consider the location-indicative role of local celebri-
ties in the network. (2) A tweet is often regarded as a set of unordered lexical items based on
the assumption of term independence and is represented as a vector using natural language
processing techniques (e.g., TF-IDF and doc2vec) to embed tweets into low-dimensional
vectors during text processing. This method is straightforward and quick, but it ignores
structural information in the text and does not capture the overall semantics of the text
content, resulting in the loss of contextual information. To address the above issues, we
propose a multi-view-based location inference model for Twitter users. Firstly, to exploit
the role of local celebrities as location indicators in social relationship networks, GMM is
used in the network view to detect local celebrities and enhance the location correlation
among users by keeping them in the network. Next, to better capture the features of user
tweets, we construct the corpus as a heterogeneous graph and mine user tweet features
by analyzing user–word and word–word correlations. Finally, we combine the previously
processed social relationship network and the learned user tweet embeddings to learn the
final embedding representation of users through a modified multilayer graph convolutional
network Gate-GCN. The main contributions of our work are as follows:
• We propose a local celebrity discovery algorithm that preserves the location-indicative
role of local celebrities in the social relationship network.
• We represent the entire corpus as a heterogeneous graph, leveraging local and global
correlations between words to extract user tweet features.
• We introduce MVGeo, a multi-view-based location inference model, which demon-
strates superior performance in experimental results on public datasets.

2. Related Work
Existing methods for inferring the location of Twitter users can be divided into three
categories: text-based, network-based, and hybrid methods, which combine text- and
network-based approaches. Text-based inference methods rely on the geographic bias
exhibited by users in their language usage on social media. Users in different regions
have different habits when using words [15]. Location-related words, such as regional
dialects, building names, and special food names, often appear in tweets from users in the
same location. Eisenstein et al. [16] analyzed the relationship between potential topics and
geographical regions and proposed a latent variable model to infer user location. Cheng
et al. [4] proposed an unsupervised method for autonomously identifying local words from
users’ tweets and inferring the user’s city-level location. Rahimi et al. [8] used the Term
Frequency–Inverse Document Frequency (TF-IDF) to extract statistical features of the text
and inferred the user location using a multilayer perceptron. Rahimi et al. [17] proposed a
method to embed two-dimensional locations in a continuous vector space and used logistic
regression to localize the user. Some studies extracted local words based on statistical
features of words [7,18] and inferred the user’s location from the extracted local words.
The text-based approach ignores the influence of users’ friendships and can achieve limited
precision. Network-based inference methods rely on the social relationships between users
to infer their locations. These methods consider the proximity between a given user and
Appl. Sci. 2023, 13, 11848 3 of 14

his/her friends, inferring the user’s location based on his/her friends’ locations [19,20].
Earlier studies [21,22] considered users who follow each other as friends and geolocated
users through social relationships between them. Davis et al. [9] used a simple maximum-
voting strategy for location inference. Jurgens et al. [23] constructed the mentioned network
using connectivity between user nodes and extended the label propagation algorithm [24]
by propagating location labels from known users to unknown users. Ebrahimi et al. [25]
identified and filtered celebrity users and inferred user locations by considering celebrity
effects. Rahimi et al. [26] proposed a hybrid method that treated one-way mentions
as undirected edges, extended the tag propagation algorithm to connected users, and
employed a text-based approach as a fallback strategy for users not connected to the social
network. However, the network-based approach is incapable of inferring the locations
of non-network-connected users. Hybrid approaches combine user-generated text and
social relationships to infer user locations, compensating for the limitations of individual
text-based or network-based methods [11]. Rahimi et al. [27] utilized a tag propagation
algorithm based on modified adsorption [28], filtered out celebrity influences in the social
network, and incorporated textual information for location inference. Rahimi et al. [12]
constructed a user relationship view based on user interactions, extracted user text features
using Bag-of-Words representations, and employed graph convolutional networks for
location inference. Bakerman et al. [29] used tweet content and social network relationships
as input features to construct a hybrid method that maps the original spatial distribution
of input features to the prediction space. Huu et al. [30] built a multi-view geolocation
model that uses not only text and network features but also timestamp data. Graph neural
networks have a wide range of applications within this field [31]. For example, Huu
et al. [11] combined node2vec-learned user network features with doc2vec-learned text
representations to infer the user’s location. Wang et al. [14] proposed a location inference
model based on Graph Attention Mechanisms and Graph Convolutional Networks (GCNs)
to fuse text and network information.

3. Proposed Methodology
In Section 3, we present a detailed description of the approach proposed in this research
work. We introduce how a Gaussian mixture model (GMM) is utilized in the network
view to detect and preserve local celebrities within the social relationship network. This
step aims to enhance the location correlation among users. Next, we delve into the tweet
view, where we represent the entire corpus as a heterogeneous graph. This graph is then
used to extract vector embeddings of user tweets, capturing the rich information within
the text. Finally, we introduce a modified multilayer graph convolutional network called
Gate-GCN, which combines the processed social relationship network and the learned
tweet embeddings. This fusion allows us to learn the final embedding representation of
the user. We employ a softmax function to determine the user’s location region based
on the final vector representation. This function assigns probabilities to each location
region, indicating the likelihood of the user belonging to a particular region. Additionally,
a cross-entropy loss function is utilized to calculate the loss, enabling us to optimize the
model during training. The overall architecture of the proposed model is illustrated in
Figure 1, which provides a visual representation of the different components and their
interactions.
Appl. Sci. 2023, 13, 11848 4 of 14

Figure 1. Technical roadmap of the proposed method in this paper. As shown in the above figure,
the nodes starting with u in the tweet view are user nodes; the rest are word nodes. Black edges are
user–word edges, and grey edges are word–word edges. After the hidden layer of GCN, R(u) and
R(w) represent the user’s tweet embedding and word embedding, respectively.

3.1. Network View

We construct a social network graph based on the @-mention relationship in users’
tweets and create an undirected edge between user L and user F if user L mentions user
F in a tweet, in the same way as Rahimi et al. [27]. We set up users who are mentioned
by more than J different users as celebrity users. In this work, we use GMM to identify
local celebrities and improve model inference by retaining local celebrities in the social
relationship network to increase the location correlation between users. GMM is a clustering
model that implies that all data points are a mixture of multiple Gaussian distributions and
searches for a mixture representation of the multidimensional Gaussian model probability
distribution to fit arbitrarily shaped data distributions. GMM also provides soft clustering,
i.e., determines the probability that each data point belongs to each cluster, and this method
is highly effective for identifying overlapping clusters and clusters with varying shapes
and sizes. The process of discovering local celebrities using the Gaussian mixture model is
depicted in Equations (1)–(4).

PR = GMM(coord, S, θm ), V = so f t max ( PR) (1)

U = GMM_means(Vnri ) (2)
cui _ner T = {e| f or e in cui _ner; i f haver sin e(e, Ue ) < T } (3)
Counter_ max( cui _ner T )
pro = pro ∈ [0, 1] (4)
len( cui _ner T )

We define the set of celebrity users as celebrities = {cu1 , cu2 , . . . cun }, the neighbors of
celebrity users cui with location information are defined as cui− ner = {nr1 , nr2 , . . . nrm },
coord ∈ Rb×2 are the coordinate points of all celebrity users’ neighbors with location
information, and b is the total number of data points. S represents the number of Gaussian
distributions in the Gaussian mixture model. θm is the initialization parameter of the
model. First, we calculate the probability matrix PR ∈ Rb×S of the user coordinate points
in the coord belonging to each Gaussian distribution using the GMM, and then the category
corresponding to the maximum value of each row of the probability matrix is used as the
category label V ∈ Rb×1 of the data points by the softmax function. Afterward, the mean
coordinates U ∈ Rb×2 of the corresponding Gaussian subdistribution (category) for each
data point are then found by the model mean function GMM− means(). For each user e of
cui _ner, the dispersion of the distribution of user e is measured by calculating the haversine
Appl. Sci. 2023, 13, 11848 5 of 14

(semi-positive vector formula) distance between e and the mean coordinate Ue of the user’s
corresponding Gaussian distribution, and the users whose haversine distance is greater
than a threshold T are removed to obtain the set cui _ner T . The Counter− max () function is
defined to find the maximum number of users belonging to the same cluster in cui _ner T ,
and the function len() is defined to find the total number of sets. If the value of pro is
greater than the threshold p, then cui _ner is regarded as a local celebrity and retained in the
social network. This process allows us to identify and retain local celebrities in the social
network, taking into account their influence on location correlation among users.

3.2. Tweet-View Construction

In our work, the entire corpus is represented as a heterogeneous graph based on the
co-occurrence relationships between words in users’ tweets and users’ mentions of words
in tweets, as shown in Figure 1’s tweet view tw, to exploit the local and global correlations
between words to extract the characteristics of users’ tweets. The weights of the edges
between user nodes and word nodes are computed using TF-IDF, which represents the
frequency of a word in a user’s tweet, and IDF, which is the Inverse Document Frequency,
i.e., the IDF of a particular word is calculated by dividing the total number of users by the
number of users whose tweets contain that word and then dividing the quotient by the
total number of users. The main idea behind TF-IDF is that if a word appears frequently in
one user’s tweets but infrequently in the tweets of other users, it is deemed to have good
category differentiation and to be suitable for classification. To exploit the global word
co-occurrence information, a sliding window of fixed size was used on all tweets in the
corpus to collect co-occurrence information for word pairs [32], and Positive Point Mutual
Information (PPMI) was used to calculate the correlation between two-word nodes. The
weights of the edges between any two nodes i and j in the tweet text view are defined as
shown in Equation (5).

PPMI (i, j) i, j are words and i 6= j




 TF − IDF(i,j) i is user , j is word
Ai,j = (5)

 1 i=j
0 otherwise


The PPMI values between word nodes i and j are computed according to Equations (6)–(8):

P(i, j)
PPMI (i, j) = log (6)
P (i ) P ( j )
W (i, j)
P(i, j) = (7)
W
W (i )
P (i ) = (8)
W
where W is the total number of sliding windows on the corpus and W (i ) is the number of
sliding windows that contain the word i. W (i, j) is the number of sliding windows that
contain both the words i and j.

3.3. Model Structure

As GCN has the advantage of being able to directly process graphically structured
data and utilize the graph’s structural information to the fullest, it is superior to other
networks. In this work, we use it to construct the location inference
model. Given an
undirected graph G = (V, E), each node νi ∈ V, each edge νi , νj ∈ E, an adjacency matrix
A ∈ R N × N , and a feature matrix X ∈ R N ×C , where N is the number of nodes and C is the
dimension of the feature vector. Equation (9) depicts the propagation principles for each
convolutional layer:
 1 1
  
H (l +1) = σ D̃ − 2 Ã D̃ − 2 H (l ) W (l ) + bl = σ ÂH (l ) W (l ) + bl (9)
Appl. Sci. 2023, 13, 11848 6 of 14

where à = A + IN , IN is the unit matrix. D̃ is the degree matrix of Ã, i.e., D̃ii = Σ j Ãij , H (l )
−1 −1
is the activation cell matrix of layer l, where H 0 = X , Â = D̃ 2 Ã D̃ 2 , and W (l ) and
b(l ) are the weight matrix and bias term, respectively, of each layer. Each layer of the GCN
is obtained by multiplying the matrix  with the feature matrix H (l ) to obtain a summary
of the features of each vertex and its neighbors.

Multi-View Fusion
For each node in the tweet view tw in Figure 1, GCN is used to aggregate its neigh-
boring nodes and its features, and the feature vector representation of the user’s tweets
is obtained by extracting the embedding of the GCN hidden layer. In this work, we
take Xtw = I(nu+nw)×(nu+nw) as the initial feature matrix of the nodes in the tweet view
(where nu and nw are the numbers of users and words, respectively, in the corpus), and the
adjacency matrix Atw of the tweet heterogeneity graph is the input to the GCN. Using a two-
layer GCN with activation functions of ReLU and softmax, the overall forward-propagation
process in the tweet view is shown in Equation (10):
   
Z = f ( Xtw , Atw ) = softmax Âtw Re LU Âtw Xtw Wtw (0) + btw 0 Wtw (1) + btw 1 (10)

After one round of training, a cross-entropy loss function is used to calculate the loss
of all tagged user nodes. For the tweet feature extraction model in tweet view tw, the user
tweet embedding R(u) in the model’s hidden layer is extracted and used as the initial text
feature in Figure 1’s multi-view hyb. For social networks, access to information about a
user’s neighbors three hops away can improve location inference [12]. Therefore, three
GCN layers are utilized for multi-view fusion to combine the characteristics of tweets
and social relationship networks. As input to the multi-view, the initial text features are
Xhy = R(u) and the filtered neighborhood matrix Ahy of the social relationship network.
Equation (11) depicts the global forward-propagation equation for the multi-view; the
activation function uses softmax and Tanh.
     
(1) (2)
Y = f ( Xhy , Ahy ) = softmax Âhy Tanh Âhy Tanh Âhy Xhy Why (0) + bhy 0 Why + b1 Why + bhy 2 (11)

As the number of layers in the GCN increases, the number of neighborhood members
per node grows exponentially. This may lead to the propagation of noisy information from
the extended neighborhood members to the user. To address this situation, with the help of
ideas from Srivastava et al. [33], a hierarchical gate is added to the information propagation
process at each layer of Equation (11), which in turn controls how much neighborhood
information needs to be passed to the nodes. The output of each layer of the modified
multilayer graph convolutional network Gate-GCN is shown in Equations (12) and (13):
   
T H l = Sigmoid Wgl H l + blg (12)
    
H l +1 = H l +1 ◦ T H l + H l ◦ 1 − T H l (13)

where H l is the input to layer l + 1, and Wgl and blg are the gating weights matrix and
deviations, respectively. Sigmoid is the activation function; ◦ represents the element
multiplication. Finally, based on the vector representation of the obtained user nodes,
the softmax function is used to infer the location labels to which they belong, and the
cross-entropy loss function is used to calculate the loss.

4. Initialization
In Section 4, we detail some groundwork before the experiment, including the intro-
duction of the dataset, the division of the user location regions, the evaluation metrics,
the introduction of the baseline model, and the setting of the experimental parameters.
Preparation is provided for the subsequent training of the model.
Appl. Sci. 2023, 13, 11848 7 of 14

4.1. Datasets
To evaluate our location inference model, we utilized GeoText, the widely used Twitter
geolocation dataset. The dataset has been pre-segmented into training, validation, and
test sets and has been extensively used for training and evaluating Twitter user location
inference models. Each sample consists of four components: the user’s username, longitude,
latitude, and tweets. Specific information is shown in Table 1; the distribution of users in
GeoText spans the continental United States. Figure 2 depicts a heatmap of the location
distribution of GeoText, with darker areas representing a higher density of users.

Table 1. Specific information about the GeoText dataset used for the experiments.

Dataset Tweets Mentions Users Train Test Dev

GeoText 378k 109K 9475 5685 1895 1895

Figure 2. Heatmap of user location distribution in GeoText.

4.2. Location Segmentation

In reality, the majority of user location coordinates are concentrated in urban areas.
This paper uses the k-d tree algorithm to discretize the user coordinates to prevent the
model prediction results from being substantially biased towards large cities (such as New
York City), wherein the hyperparameter bucket_size controls the maximum number of
users for each location region. The k-d tree algorithm is then used to assign users in the
training set with similar location distances to the same location region, and the central
coordinate point of each region is set as the average longitude and latitude coordinates
of all users within that region. For each user’s coordinates in the validation and test sets,
the centroid of each region is traversed and the haversine formula is used to calculate the
distance between the centroid’s coordinates and the user’s coordinates. Then, the users
in the training and test sets are designated to the region in which the centroid is closest to
them. The area number of the user’s location is used as its label. Figure 3 depicts the result
of using k-d tree to classify the user coordinates in the training set in GeoText. Each color
block represents a location area.
Appl. Sci. 2023, 13, 11848 8 of 14

Figure 3. Results of user coordinate partitioning in the training set in GeoText using k-d tree.

4.3. Evaluation Indicators

The model’s efficacy was assessed using the following three metrics: (1) acc@161: the
proportion of users whose locations were estimated to be within 161 miles of the actual
location, (2) mean: the average distance of all users’ errors, and (3) median: the user errors
are evaluated, and then the median of all user errors is used as the median error. The
more effective the location inference model is based on these three metrics, the higher the
acc@161 and the lower the mean and median will be. The formulas for the three evaluation
indicators are shown as follows:
1
| Ntest | q∈∑


Acc161 = haversine L p , Lr ≤ 161 (14)
Ntest

1
| Ntest | q∈∑


Mean = haversine L p , Lr (15)
Ntest



Median = median haversine L p , Lr (16)
where L p and Lr represent the user’s predicted and actual positions, respectively, haversine
is the semi-positive vector formula, Ntest is the set of users in the test set, q is one of the
users in Ntest , and | Ntest | is the number of data points in Ntest .

4.4. Baseline Model

We compare the multi-view-based location inference model MVGeo to the following
baselines:
• MADCEL [27] combines text and web data with a logistic regression model to conduct
location prediction.
• MLP4Geo [8] is a text-based model that improves prediction performance by employ-
ing dialectal terms. A simple MLP network is utilized for location prediction.
• MENET [30] is an architecture that integrates numerous tweet characteristics. In
MENET, we only use text and network information to ensure a fair comparison, i.e.,
we do not use its metadata, such as timestamps.
• GeoAtt [34] models textual contexts using an RNN based on attention. We omit the
location description from GeoAtt to ensure an equitable comparison.
• DCCA [12] is a multi-view geolocation model that uses Twitter text and network data.
• BiLSTM-C [35] is a text-view geolocation model that views user-generated content
and its associated locations as sequences and infers locations using bidirectional long
short-term memory (LSTM) and convolution operations.
• Attn [35] is an attentional memory network for the localization of social media mes-
sages. It consists of an attentional message encoder that concentrates on location-
indicative terms selectively to produce a differentiated message representation.
Appl. Sci. 2023, 13, 11848 9 of 14

• SGC4Geo [36] is a simplified graph convolutional network that reduces the superflu-
ous complexity of GCNs by removing non-linearities between GCN layers iteratively
and collapsing the resulting function into a single linear transformation. It determines
a user’s residence based on his/her social posts and connections.
• M-GCN [14] employs graph convolutional networks to extract user text and link
information from multiple perspectives to infer the location of the user.
• KB-emb [37] is a location inference technique that relies on entity linking and knowl-
edge base embedding.
• MetaGeo [13] proposes a general framework for identifying user geolocation based on
meta-learning to learn the prior distribution of geolocation tasks.

4.5. Experimental Settings

During the training of the model, the hidden layer dimension was assigned to 300
for GeoText. The k-d tree algorithm’s hyperparameters bucket_size was set to 50. For
optimization functions, the Adam optimizer was used, and the initial values of Dropout
and lr were 0.5 and 0.02, respectively. The sliding window size in the tweet view was
set to 20. For detecting local celebrities on the network view of GeoText, the number of
sub-distributions S of the Gaussian mixture model, the celebrity threshold J, the distance
threshold T, and the scale threshold ρ were set to 125, 5, 80, and 0.7, respectively. The
activation functions for each layer of the feature extraction model in the tweet view were
(ReLU, softmax), whereas the activation functions for each layer of the feature extraction
model in the hybrid view were (Tanh, Tanh, softmax). If the verification loss did not
decrease for 20 epochs in a row, the model training procedure was terminated early.

5. Experimental Results
In Section 5, we present the evaluation results of the location inference model proposed
in this work on the public dataset. Specifically, we conduct extensive experiments to answer
the following research questions:
• How well does the MVGeo model proposed in this work perform on location inference
compared to current state-of-the-art baseline models?
• How well does the model proposed in this work perform when trained on a small
amount of data using only the tweet view?
• How do the tweet view and the network view affect the inference effectiveness of the
model?
• What is a good choice for the number of subdistributions for the Gaussian mixture
model in the network view?

5.1. Location Inference Model Performance

Table 2 shows the performance of our model on the dataset, with the best performance
shown in bold and where MVGeo is the model proposed in this work. Compared to the
previous baseline approaches, our proposed model improves the evaluation metric on the
GeoText dataset by 1.6% for Acc@161, with a 14 km reduction in mean error and 1 km
reduction in median error relative to the most-effective baseline model: MetaGeo. This
suggests that the multi-view-based location inference task explored in this work is feasible
and can be effective at extracting user tweets and network features. In the hybrid view, the
variation in loss values during the training of the graph neural network model is shown in
Figure 4.
Appl. Sci. 2023, 13, 11848 10 of 14

Table 2. Inference performance on the Twitter dataset.

GeoText
Acc@161 Median Mean
MADCEL [27] 58 60 586
MLP4Geo [8] 38 389 844
MENET [30] 55 125 643
GeoAtt [34] 57 81 612
DCCA [12] 56 79 627
BiLSTM-C [35] 45 363 796
Attn [35] 52 236 657
SGC4Geo [36] 61 45 543
M-GCN [14] 61.10 46.09 519.27
KB-emb [37] 43 321 793
MetaGeo [13] 62 42 533
MVGeo 63.6 41 519

Figure 4. Loss of GCN for multi-view fusion.

We have added Figure 4 here to show the variation in loss values.

5.2. Single-View Impact

To investigate the respective roles of the tweet view and network view in the location
inference model, we adjusted the model to produce two variant experiments: MVGEO-net
and MVGEO-tw. MVGEO-net represents the original model MVGEO with the network
view removed, while MVGEO-tw represents the original model with the tweet view
removed. The experimental results are shown in Figure 5. The results show that, relatively
speaking, the network view plays a major role in the location inference process. This also
inspires us to continue exploring the extraction of location information in social relationship
networks in our future work.
Appl. Sci. 2023, 13, 11848 11 of 14

Figure 5. The impacts of single views on location inference modeling.

5.3. Small-Scale Dataset

Due to the high cost of data sample annotation and the effect of the collected corpus
on location indicator terms and mention relations in tweets, these variables can impact
the model’s inferential efficacy. Therefore, to investigate the performance of the model
presented in this work in more depth, we conducted experiments using only a small
number of samples with annotations on the tweet view. This experiment produced the
model variant MVGeo-net, which reduces the labeling cost and removes the effect of
mention relations. As demonstrated in Figure 6, by comparison with the text-based model
MLP4Geo [8], MVGeo-net’s performance improves on all three evaluation metrics. This
shows that the method proposed in this work not only saves resources but also improves
our understanding of model performance.

Figure 6. Inference performance of the model using a small training set. MVGeo-net uses only the
text view, and the numbers in front of the model indicate the percentage of the training set that
was used.

5.4. Ablation Experiments

To further analyze the model proposed in this research work, we conducted an ablation
study, and Table 3 shows the results.
In (1), we used the commonly used TF-IDF in the tweet view to extract text features
to obtain the model variant MVGeo-TF. This was used to verify the effectiveness of the
method used in this research work to extract tweet features by analyzing the correlation
Appl. Sci. 2023, 13, 11848 12 of 14

between words. As can be seen from Table 3, the method proposed in this paper helps to
mine user tweet features.
In (2), in order to verify the effectiveness of the local celebrity discovery algorithm
proposed in this research work in the network view, we removed the local celebrity discov-
ery algorithm proposed in this research work to obtain the model variant MVGeo-LC. For
users who are mentioned by more than J different users, we use the approach of Rahimi
et al. [27] to remove them directly from the social network. Table 3 shows that retaining the
location-indicating role of local celebrities helps to improve the effectiveness of location
inference.

Table 3. Results of ablation experiments.

GeoText
Acc@161 Median Mean
MVGeo 63.6 41 519
(1) MVGeo-TF 61.3 47 540
(2) MVGeo-LC 62.5 42 530

5.5. Choice of S-Value

In the network view, the neighbor coordinates of all celebrity users are clustered using
a Gaussian mixture model, and the number of Gaussian sub-distributions, S, impacts the
model fitting. Akaike Information Criterion (AIC) and Bayesian Information Criterion
(BIC) can be used to determine the extent of the influence of the S value on the Gaussian
mixture model. By adding a penalty term proportional to the number of model parameters,
these two metrics circumvent the overfitting issue and select the value of S by minimizing
the AIC and BIC. Figure 7 depicts the effect of the S value on model fitting on the GeoText
dataset. Combining the changes to the two indicators, the magnitude of S on the GeoText
dataset is estimated to be 125 in this study.

Figure 7. Selection of the value of S.

6. Conclusions
This paper introduces MVGeo, a comprehensive framework for user location inference
that leverages multiple views, including network and tweet features. In the network
view, we propose for the first time to utilize Gaussian mixture models to filter and retain
local celebrities in social relationship networks, which effectively enhances the location
relevance of users in social relationship networks. In the tweet view, we construct tweets
as heterogeneous graphs and extract tweet features by graph convolutional networks.
Compared to the commonly used TF-IDF method for extracting text features, this approach
also takes into account word–word connections to obtain more informative tweet features.
Appl. Sci. 2023, 13, 11848 13 of 14

We conduct extensive tests on a public Twitter dataset to evaluate the performance of

MVGeo. The results demonstrate the superiority of our methodology compared to existing
approaches. In the future, we plan to further enhance the performance of MVGeo by
incorporating additional user feature data, such as user metadata. This extension will
enable us to capture a more comprehensive understanding of users and their location-
related patterns, thus improving the accuracy of location inference.

Author Contributions: H.W.: Conceptualization, Methodology, and Writing—review and editing.

J.L.: Investigation, Data collection, Data interpretation, Software, and Writing—original draft. S.L.:
Data interpretation and Software. H.L.: Validation and Visualization. J.M.: Validation and Writing—
reviewing. Y.Q.: Writing—review and editing and Resources. All authors have read and agreed to
the published version of the manuscript.
Funding: This work was supported by the National Natural Science Foundation of China
(No. 62272163), the Open Foundation of Henan Key Laboratory of Cyberspace Situation Aware-
ness (No. HNTS2022005), the Songshan Laboratory (No. YYJC012022023), and the Henan Province
Science Foundation (No. 232300420150).
Institutional Review Board Statement: Not applicable.
Informed Consent Statement: Not applicable.
Data Availability Statement: The public data presented in this study are available on request from
the corresponding author.
Conflicts of Interest: The authors declare that they have no conflict of interest to report regarding
the present study.

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