Leveraging geographical metadata to improve search over social media

Alexander Kotov, Yu Wang, Eugene Agichtein

Abstract: We propose the methods for document, query and relevance model expansion that leverage geographical metadata provided by social media. In particular, we propose a geographically-aware extension of the LDA topic model and utilize the resulting topics and language models in our expansion methods. The proposed approach has been experimentally evaluated over a large sample of Twitter, demonstrating significant improvements in search accuracy over traditional (geographically-unaware) retrieval models.