Title: A survey of location inference techniques on Twitter,
Abstract: The increasing popularity of the social networking service, Twitter, has made
it more involved in day-to-day communications, strengthening social
relationships and information dissemination. Conversations on Twitter are now
being explored as indicators within early warning systems to alert of imminent
natural disasters such earthquakes and aid prompt emergency responses to crime.
Producers are privileged to have limitless access to market perception from
consumer comments on social media and microblogs. Targeted advertising can be
made more effective based on user profile information such as demography,
interests and location. While these applications have proven beneficial, the
ability to effectively infer the location of Twitter users has even more
immense value. However, accurately identifying where a message originated from
or author's location remains a challenge thus essentially driving research in
that regard. In this paper, we survey a range of techniques applied to infer
the location of Twitter users from inception to state-of-the-art. We find
significant improvements over time in the granularity levels and better
accuracy with results driven by refinements to algorithms and inclusion of more
spatial features.