Time-critical geolocation for social good

Abstract

Twitter has become an instrumental source of news in emergencies where efficient access, dissemination of information, and immediate reactions are critical. Nevertheless, due to several challenges, the current fully-automated processing methods are not yet mature enough for deployment in real scenarios. In this dissertation, I focus on tackling the lack of context problem by studying automatic geo-location techniques. I specifically aim to study the Location Mention Prediction problem in which the system has to extract location mentions in tweets and pin them on the map. To address this problem, I aim to exploit different techniques such as training neural models, enriching the tweet representation, and studying methods to mitigate the lack of labeled data. I anticipate many downstream applications for the Location Mention Prediction problem such as incident detection, real-time action management during emergencies, and fake news and rumor detection among others.