Changes in Twitter geolocations: Insights and suggestions for future usage

Anna Kruspe, Matthias Häberle, Eike J. Hoffmann, Samyo Rode-Hasinger, Karam Abdulahhad, Xiao Xiang Zhu


Abstract
Twitter data has become established as a valuable source of data for various application scenarios in the past years. For many such applications, it is necessary to know where Twitter posts (tweets) were sent from or what location they refer to. Researchers have frequently used exact coordinates provided in a small percentage of tweets, but Twitter removed the option to share these coordinates in mid-2019. Moreover, there is reason to suspect that a large share of the provided coordinates did not correspond to GPS coordinates of the user even before that. In this paper, we explain the situation and the 2019 policy change and shed light on the various options of still obtaining location information from tweets. We provide usage statistics including changes over time, and analyze what the removal of exact coordinates means for various common research tasks performed with Twitter data. Finally, we make suggestions for future research requiring geolocated tweets.
Anthology ID:
2021.wnut-1.24
Volume:
Proceedings of the Seventh Workshop on Noisy User-generated Text (W-NUT 2021)
Month:
November
Year:
2021
Address:
Online
Venues:
EMNLP | WNUT
SIG:
Publisher:
Association for Computational Linguistics
Note:
Pages:
212–221
Language:
URL:
https://aclanthology.org/2021.wnut-1.24
DOI:
10.18653/v1/2021.wnut-1.24
Bibkey:
Cite (ACL):
Anna Kruspe, Matthias Häberle, Eike J. Hoffmann, Samyo Rode-Hasinger, Karam Abdulahhad, and Xiao Xiang Zhu. 2021. Changes in Twitter geolocations: Insights and suggestions for future usage. In Proceedings of the Seventh Workshop on Noisy User-generated Text (W-NUT 2021), pages 212–221, Online. Association for Computational Linguistics.
Cite (Informal):
Changes in Twitter geolocations: Insights and suggestions for future usage (Kruspe et al., WNUT 2021)
Copy Citation:
PDF:
https://preview.aclanthology.org/update-css-js/2021.wnut-1.24.pdf