Geocontext: discovering geographical topics from social media
ELIZABETH S. WILLIAMS · Advances in Social Networks Analysis and Mining · 2016
Social media is often useful for discovering contextual information that is difficult to find on traditional query-based search engines such as Google. For example, temporal events such as traffic incidents are often posted on social media due to the wide-reaching and real-time nature of social media platforms. Social media can also be used to model the sentiments and opinions of different geographical regions, as well as provide a platform for organizing social movements. In this paper, we give an overview of our system, GeoContext, which models a stream from Twitter into topics and analyzes the geographical locations of the topics. GeoContext includes methods for filtering a social media stream by keywords and location coordinates in order to provide more specific topics. GeoContext includes a geolocation module, called GeoContext Locator, for predicting the locations of tweets that are not associated with explicit coordinates, in order to model topics in different locations.