Abstract
We investigate the influence of language on the accuracy of geolocating Twitter users. Our analysis, using a large corpus of tweets written in thirteen languages, provides a new understanding of the reasons behind reported performance disparities between languages. The results show that data imbalance has a greater impact on accuracy than geographical coverage. A comparison between micro and macro averaging demonstrates that existing evaluation approaches are less appropriate than previously thought. Our results suggest both averaging approaches should be used to effectively evaluate geolocation.
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Notes
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An open source language identification tool, trained over 97 languages, and tested over six European languages with an accuracy of 0.94. We accepted predictions with confidence \(\ge \)0.5 only.
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Although Cheng et al. [3] showed empirically that the percentage of tweeters within x miles increases as x increases, e.g., 30% of tweeters are placed within 16Â km and 51% within 161Â km, all subsequent research used an arbitrarily chosen 161Â km. Note, Cheng et al. tested only on a US-based dataset, where the average distance between neighboring cities might be different from densely populated or small countries. Accuracy within 161Â km might not be an effective evaluation measure from a language comparison perspective, however as it has been used in past work, we use it here.
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Acknowledgments
This work was made possible by NPRP grant# NPRP 6-1377-1-257 from the Qatar National Research Fund (a member of Qatar Foundation). The statements made herein are solely the responsibility of the authors.
We thank the anonymous reviewers for their careful reading of our manuscript and their many insightful comments and suggestions.
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Mourad, A., Scholer, F., Sanderson, M. (2017). Language Influences on Tweeter Geolocation. In: Jose, J., et al. Advances in Information Retrieval. ECIR 2017. Lecture Notes in Computer Science(), vol 10193. Springer, Cham. https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-319-56608-5_26
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