Geotagging Social Media Content with a Refined Language Modelling Approach

Abstract

The problem of content geotagging, i.e. estimating the geographic position of a piece of content (text message, tagged image, etc.) when this is not explicitly available, has attracted increasing interest as the large volumes of user-generated content posted through social media platforms such as Twitter and Instagram form nowadays a key element in the coverage of news stories and events. In particular, in large-scale incidents, where location is an important factor, such as natural disasters and terrorist attacks, a large number of people around the globe post comments and content to social media. Yet, the large majority of content lacks proper geographic information (in the form of latitude and longitude coordinates) and hence cannot be utilized to the full extent (e.g., by viewing citizens reports on a map). To this end, we present a new geotagging approach that can estimate the location of a post based on its text using refined language models that are learned from massive corpora of social media content. Using a large benchmark collection, we demonstrate the improvements in geotagging accuracy as a result of the proposed refinements.