A Stacking-based Approach to Twitter User Geolocation Prediction

We implement a city-level geolocation prediction system for Twitter users. The system infers a user’s location based on both tweet text and user-declared metadata using a stacking approach. We demonstrate that the stacking method substantially outperforms benchmark methods, achieving 49% accuracy on a benchmark dataset. We further evaluate our method on a recent crawl of Twitter data to investigate the impact of temporal factors on model generalisation. Our results suggest that user-declared location metadata is more sensitive to temporal change than the text of Twitter messages. We also describe two ways of accessing/demoing our system.