Location reference identification from tweets during emergencies: A deep learning approach

Twitter is recently being used during crises to communicate with officials and provide rescue and relief operation in real time. The geographical location information of the event, as well as users, are vitally important in such scenarios. The identification of geographic location is one of the challenging tasks as the location information fields, such as user location and place name of tweets are not reliable. The extraction of location information from tweet text is difficult as it contains a lot of nonstandard English, grammatical errors, spelling mistakes, nonstandard abbreviations, and so on. This research aims to extract location words used in the tweet using a Convolutional Neural Network (CNN) based model. We achieved the exact matching score of 0.929, Hamming loss of 0.002, and F Our model was able to extract even three-to four-word long location references which is also evident from the exact matching score of over 92%. The findings of this paper can help in early event localization, emergency situations, real-time road traffic management, localized advertisement, and in various location-based services. Keywords: Location references, Tweets, Geo-locations, Named entity recognition, Gazetteer, Convolutional Neural Network 1. Introduction Tweets are very responsive to real-world events, and are sometimes even more immediate than traditional news channels. Therefore, it is possible to keep track of the latest information by following tweets. Several examples were seen when the news was first reported on Twitter, such as an airplane crash over the Hudson River in New York in the year 2009 (Sakaki et al., 2013), the death of former British Prime Minister Margaret Thatcher in April 2013 Preprint submitted to Elsevier January 25, 2019 Sakaki et al., 2013; Singh et al., 2017; Yuan & Liu, 2018). In an American Red Cross survey, a question was asked to individuals that "whom they contacted in an emergency?" The estimation and detection of location information of events and users from tweets are a major concern in relation to the above-mentioned tasks. Twitter provides three location information fields for sharing a user's location: (1) User location; (2) Place name; and (3) Geo-coordinate. The user location field has 140 character spaces (previously it was limited to 30 characters) in which the user can write his/her home location information while creating their profile. This field is optional to the user and the user can write any arbitrary words or leave it blank.