Social and Behavioral Sciences Commons^™

Twitter Location (Sometimes) Matters: Exploring The Relationship Between Georeferenced Tweet Content And Nearby Feature Classes, Stefan Hahmann, Ross S. Purves, Dirk Burghardt

Journal of Spatial Information Science

In this paper, we investigate whether microblogging texts (tweets) produced on mobile devices are related to the geographical locations where they were posted. For this purpose, we correlate tweet topics to areas. In doing so, classified points of interest from OpenStreetMap serve as validation points. We adopted the classification and geolocation of these points to correlate with tweet content by means of manual, supervised, and unsupervised machine learning approaches. Evaluation showed the manual classification approach to be highest quality, followed by the supervised method, and that the unsupervised classification was of low quality. We found that the degree to which …