drag2share: IBM researchers' algorithm explores tweets for home location cues

Source: http://phys.org/news/2014-03-ibm-algorithm-explores-tweets-home.html

(Phys.org) —By drawing on the content of users' tweets and their tweeting behavior, a team of three IBM researchers said they have a new algorithm to infer the home location of Twitter users at different granularities, including city, state, time zone or geographic region. The algorithm makes use of the person's last 200 tweets for tracking. The scientists described their approach as an "ensemble of statistical and heuristic classifiers" and with this approach they said they could predict locations and make use of a geographic gazetteer dictionary (USGS [United States Geological Survey] gazetteer) to identify place-name entities. They analyzed movement variations of Twitter users, built a classifier to predict whether a user was travelling in a certain period of time and used that to further improve their detection accuracy.

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