Improving geolocation of social media posts

Pervasive social systems often take advantage of geographical information to provide real-time information to users based on their location. However, due to privacy concerns, many social media users do not share their exact geographical coordinates. In this paper, we describe our technique that predicts locations of posts that are not associated with explicit coordinates, a process called geolocation. Existing research has utilized the content of a post as well as the post author’s social media relationships with other users to estimate location. Our research provides a novel approach to geolocation by combining multiple techniques, as well as adding a new technique: estimating location by clustering similar social media posts that are centered in a geographical area.