GLDM: Geo-location prediction of twitter users with deep learning methods1

Abstract

Social networks like Twitter are extremely popular and widely used, which has increased interest in studying the information posted there. One such analytical application is extracting location information of users for real-time monitoring of the objects and events of interest, such as political and social events, disease surveillance, natural calamities, and crime prevention. Identifying geographic location is a nontrivial task, as user profiles contain outdated and inaccurate location information. Furthermore, extracting geographical information from Arabic tweets is challenging since they contain many nonstandard data (dialects), complex structures, abbreviations, grammatical and spelling mistakes, etc. This study focuses on the localization of Saudi Arabian users who tweet in Arabic. This study proposes a convolutional neural network-based deep learning model to predict a Twitter user’s region-level location using user profiles, text texts, place attachments, and historical tweets. The model was evaluated empirically on a dataset of 95,739 tweets written in Arabic and produced by 4,331 users from Saudi Arabia cities. Regarding classification accuracy, the proposed CNN model outperformed machine learning classifiers such as NB, LR, and SVM with a 60% accuracy on the test set. This study is the first of its kind, aimed at localizing Saudi users based on their tweets.