Location Prediction of Twitter Users

Introduction

With the advent of social media, many applications like brand management, personalization and recommendation systems, real time event detection and crisis management are based on insights obtained from user generated content on Twitter. The geographical location of a Twitter user is key to these applications. Recent studies have shown that less than 4% of tweets are tagged with latitude and longitude information. Existing approaches to predict the location of a Twitter user are statistical and need large training datasets to create models that predict the location of a user. In this work, we leverage Wikipedia to determine local entities of a city and use these entities to predict the location of a Twitter user.