From Interest to Function: Location Estimation in Social Media

Recent years have witnessed the tremendous development of social media, which attracts a vast number of Internet users. The high-dimension content generated by these users provides an unique opportunity to understand their behavior deeply. As one of the most fundamental topics, location estimation attracts more and more research efforts. Different from the previous literature, we find that user’s location is strongly related to user interest. Based on this, we first build a detection model to mine user interest from short text. We then establish the mapping between location function and user interest before presenting an efficient framework to predict the user’s location with convincing fidelity. Thorough evaluations and comparisons on an authentic data set show that our proposed model significantly outperforms the state-of-the-arts approaches. Moreover, the high efficiency of our model also guarantees its applicability in real-world scenarios.