TY - GEN
T1 - Changes in Twitter geolocations
T2 - 7th Workshop on Noisy User-Generated Text, W-NUT 2021
AU - Kruspe, Anna
AU - Häberle, Matthias
AU - Hoffmann, Eike J.
AU - Rode-Hasinger, Samyo
AU - Abdulahhad, Karam
AU - Zhu, Xiao Xiang
N1 - Publisher Copyright:
© 2021 Association for Computational Linguistics.
PY - 2021
Y1 - 2021
N2 - 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.
AB - 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.
UR - http://www.scopus.com/inward/record.url?scp=85138726631&partnerID=8YFLogxK
M3 - Conference contribution
AN - SCOPUS:85138726631
T3 - W-NUT 2021 - 7th Workshop on Noisy User-Generated Text, Proceedings of the Conference
SP - 212
EP - 221
BT - W-NUT 2021 - 7th Workshop on Noisy User-Generated Text, Proceedings of the Conference
A2 - Xu, Wei
A2 - Ritter, Alan
A2 - Baldwin, Tim
A2 - Rahimi, Afshin
PB - Association for Computational Linguistics (ACL)
Y2 - 11 November 2021
ER -