Geolocation of Tweets with a BiLSTM Regression Model

AbstractIdentifying a user’s location can be useful for recommendation systems, demographic analyses, and disaster outbreak monitoring. Although Twitter allows users to voluntarily reveal their location, such information isn’t universally available. Analyzing a tweet can provide a general estimation of a tweet location while giving insight into the dialect of the user and other linguistic markers. Such linguistic attributes can be used to provide a regional approximation of tweet origins. In this paper, we present a neural regression model that can identify the linguistic intricacies of a tweet to predict the location of the user. The final model identifies the dialect embedded in the tweet and predicts the location of the tweet.