Feature Extraction of Geo-tagged Tweets
Sneha Saha
Student id -4600916
Email id -S.SSaha @student.tudelft.nl
Abstract -- With the advancement of web technology
and its growth, there is a huge volume of data present in
the web for internet users and a lot of data is generated
too. Social networking sites like Twitter, Facebook are
rapidly gaining popularity as they allow people to share
and express their views about topics, have discussion
with different communities, or post messages across the
world. In this paper, we investigate the linguistic feature
for detecting the sentiment of twitter message related to
a geolocation.The tweets has been downloaded via
Twitter Streaming API (location based approach) and
filter by geo-locations (co-ordinate of a city) and
location indicative words (LIWs) via feature selection.
In this paper, we describe a method for geo-spatial
tweets detection on Social Media streams. We monitor
all posts on Twitter issued in a given geographic region
and then analyzed the sentiment of the tweets. A novel
approach is adopted for automatically classifying the
sentiment of Twitter messages. Therefore, in this paper
we focus on sentiment polarity analysis .This is useful
for consumers who want to research the sentiment of
products before purchase, or companies that want to
monitor the public sentiment of their brands in a
region. Only geo-location specific data has been
collected from Twitter to predict sentiment of the
people related to that geo-location.
Keyword: Keywords Twitter, sentiment analysis, Social
Media Analytics.
1.INTRODUCTION-
With the ever-growing popularity of social media,
massive volumes of user-generated data are produced
every day, e.g. in the form of Twitter messages
(tweets) . A large part of these originate from private
users who describe how they currently feel, what they
are doing, or what is happening around them. We are
only starting to understand how to leverage the
potential of these real-time information streams. As
cities are hubs in global network, it could be assumed
that their citizen, companies and others who are
located in one of those cities produce a high amount
of social media content. Furthermore people from
other places can mention those cities and "talk" about
city focused topics. City names are popular in spam
tweets and they are often chained to draw the attention
of messages which are not city related at all. This data
provides many new opportunities and challenges for
natural language processing. One such challenge is
predicting the tweets based on geolocation. Therefore
we analyzed the tweets which are produced in the city
within a geographic region in term of quantity,
discussed topic and related to city specific properties
like size or population. Therefore its interesting to
investigate the temporal aspects of a tweet of a geo-
location.
Specifically, we aim at answering the following
questions:
RQ1: To what extent geo-location tweets helps in
sentiment analysis within a geographic region ?
RQ2: To what extend feature extraction possible
from the tweets within the region?
There has been a large amount of research in the area
of sentiment classification. Traditionally most of it has
focused on classifying larger pieces of text, like
reviews [1]. Tweets (and micro blogs in general) are
different from reviews primarily because of their
purpose: while reviews represent summarized
thoughts of authors, tweets are more casual and
limited to 140 characters of text. Generally, tweets are
not as thoughtfully composed as reviews. Yet, they
still offer companies an additional avenue to gather
feedback. There has been some work by researchers in
the area of phrase level and sentence level sentiment
classification recently [2]. Previous research on
analyzing blog posts includes [3]. Sentiment analysis
is a relatively new area, which deals with extracting
user opinion automatically. An example of a positive
sentiment is, natural language processing is fun
alternatively, a negative sentiment is its a horrible
day, i am not going outside. Objective texts are
deemed not to be expressing any sentiment, such as
news headlines, for example company shelves wind
sector plans. There are many ways in which social
network data can be leveraged to give a better
understanding of user opinion such problems are at
the heart of natural language processing (NLP) and
data mining research.
1.1 Characteristic of Tweets obvious that a short time like a week is not sufficient
to get fully robust data. For example there could have
Twitter messages have many unique attributes, which been ,and it's very likely that there would be special
differentiates it form other reviews:
events in some cities while in other cities special
Length The maximum length of a Twitter message is
140 characters. From our training set, we calculate events might have been a week earlier or later. Those
that the average length of a tweet is 14 words or 78 events could influence the amount of tweets produced
characters. This is very different from the previous in a day. Using the Streaming API tweets were
sentiment classification research that focused on retrieved which had a valid geo-location .The radius
classifying longer bodies of work, such as movie of the circle is based on official size of the city areas.
reviews. Otherwise co-ordinates of Google Maps are used to
Data availability Another difference is the magnitude
retrieve tweets for that particular city. The use of
of data available. With the Twitter API, it is very easy
to collect millions of tweets for training. In past longitude and latitude to define locations is forced by
research, tests only consisted of thousands of training Twitter API itself and support searching for tweets
items. published within a valid geo-location.
Language model Twitter users post messages from
many different media, including their cell phones. The
frequency of misspellings and slang in tweets is much
higher than in other domains.
Domain Twitter users post short messages about a
variety of topics unlike other sites which are tailored
to a specified topic. This differs from a large
percentage of past research, which focused on specific
domains such as movie reviews.

1.1. Defining Sentiment

Sentiment analysis is the task of identifying positive

and negative opinions, emotions, and evaluations [4].
Since its inception sentiment analysis has been subject
of an intensive research effort and has been
successfully applied e.g., to assist users in their
development by providing them with interesting and Figure1.Geographical plot of the location from where
supportive content [5], predict the outcome of an the tweets are collected
election [6] or movie sales [7]. The spectrum of
sentiment analysis techniques ranges from identifying In the context of Twitter, only about 1% of tweets are
polarity (positive or negative) to a complex geo referenced. Thus, Watanabe et al. [12] try to
computational treatment of subjectivity, opinion and assign geo coordinates to non-geotagged tweets to
sentiment [8]. In particular, the research on sentiment increase the chance of finding localized events. Then,
polarity analysis has resulted in a number of mature
they search for place names and count the number of
and publicly available tools such as SentiStrength [9],
Alchemy1 , Stanford NLP sentiment analyzer [10] key terms that co-occur with each place name.
and NLTK [11] Nevertheless, their method fails to find localized
events when no places are mentioned in the tweets.

With the large range of topics discussed on Twitter, it

2.DATA COLLECTION AND PREPROCESSING
To examine the tweet characteristic , Twitter API was
used for the data extraction process .We extracted
tweets from Twitter which are with geo information
within 5km radius of the city areas(Figure 1). All
tweets were collected which matched our criteria and
were published on Twitter during December 2016.It is
would be very difficult to manually collect enough
data to train a sentiment classifier for tweets. Our
solution is to use a model based approach which uses
machine learning techniques. For each tweet data
processing each is related by using TF-IDF vector.
Before processing data cleaning is necessary for tweet
data. Tokenization process from [13] and [14] was
followed for the data preprocessing task. The steps
followed included the removal of any urls and
usernames (usernames follow the @symbol) and
removal any characters that repeat more than twice
turning a phrase such as OOMMMGGG to
OOMMGG, which is applied by a regular expression.
The tweets collected from city can be various
language ,so first all the tweets collected are translated
to English. For tweet processing ,all the tweets are
converted to lowercase and filter applied to remove
basic common English words like "is", "the" etc.
Further if any word is below 3 digit and higher than
20 digits are also removed. Finally Porter Stem
algorithm is applied to reduce any word to its base
form like "taken", "took" converted to its base form
"take".
3. APPROACHES FOR SENTIMENT ANALYSIS-
The resulting term document matrix is used to train an
SVM classifier(Naives Bayes) inside Validation
operator. This Classifier first has to be trained with a
training dataset, and then it can be used to actually
classify documents. The set of training examples of
positve and negative word tweets are chosen
correctly, the Classifier then predict the class
probabilities of the actual documents with a similar
accuracy (as the training examples). After
classification each tweet has been classified into two
segment polarity and subjectivity. Polarity denotes
whether the tweet is neutral,positve or of negative
sentiment .And subjectivity classify a tweet as
objective or subjective based on comparing with the
training dataset. The objective and subjective
comparison shows that the interjections and personal
pronouns are strong indicators of subjective texts
whilst common and proper nouns are indicators of
objective texts. Subjective texts are often written in
first or second person in past tense whilst objective
texts are often written in third person.
3.1 Emoticons
Since the training process makes use of emoticons as
noisy labels, it is crucial to discuss the role they play
in classification. We will discuss in detail our training
and test set in the Result section. We strip the
emoticons out from our training data. If we leave the
emoticons in, there is a negative impact on Naive
Bayes. The difference lies in the mathematical models
and feature weight selection of MaxEnt and SVM
.Stripping out the emoticons causes the classifier to
learn from the other features (e.g. unigrams and
bigrams) present in the tweet. The classifier uses these
non-emoticon features to determine the sentiment.
This is an interesting side-effect of our approach. If
the test data contains an emoticon, it does not
influence the classifier because emoticon features are
not part of its training data. This is a current limitation
of our approach because it would be useful to take
emoticons into account when classifying test data.We
consider emoticons as noisy labels because they are
not perfect at defining the correct sentiment of a
tweet. This can be seen in the following tweet:
@BATMANNN :( i love chutney.... Without the
emoticon, most people would probably consider this
tweet to be positive. Tweets with these types of
mismatched emoticons are used to train our classifiers
because they are difficult to filter out from our
training data.
3.2Natural Language Processing
The first step to analyzing the Tweets is natural
language processing (NLP). The techniques used to
classify the Tweets all focus on a bag of words
approach. As such, the NLP portion of the project
focused on developing an efficient way to get the best
bag of words from any given Tweet. Initially, we
eliminate obvious stop words that dont contribute to
the content of a Tweet. This list includes words such
as a, I, she, etc. Afterwards, we define words
as a string of alphabetic characters with whitespace on
both sides. Note that this ignores things such as
numbers and emoticons. Once the set of words in each
Tweet has been computed for each Tweet in the
training data, mutual information is used to determine
the words that provide the most insight to the content
of the Tweets. For our purposes we used about 1000
words. With these, each Tweet was thus characterized
by which of these 1000 words appeared. For example,
for the Tweet I am not happy. He is not happy and
the mutual information words not and happy, the
Tweet would be characterized as [not, happy].
Note that the number of times a word appears is not
taken into account. Once a Tweet has been
characterized by the above steps, it is passed along to
the machine learning portion of the classification.
3.2. Machine Learning Approach-
Machine learning based approach uses classification
technique to classify text into classes. There are
mainly two types of machine learning techniques
3.2.1. Unsupervised learning:
It does not consist of a category and they do not
provide with the correct targets at all and therefore
rely on clustering.
 Before processing all the unwanted data are cleaned
3.2.2. Supervised learning: using Rapidminer.A sample of the clean tweet data is
shown in Table 1.
It is based on labeled dataset and thus the labels are
provided to the model during the process. These @godavar what an anti- what anti-national.
labeled dataset are trained to get meaningful outputs national. Why doesn't he use Why does not he
when encountered during decision-making. PayTM? use PayTM
The success of both this learning methods is mainly @kayotickitchen get here so get here so bitter
depends on the selection and extraction of the specific bitter
set of features used to detect sentiment. @Schiphol That is a gross gross error
The machine learning approach applicable to error in personnel. A lot of personnel. lot of
sentiment analysis mainly belongs to supervised people stand in line and in people stand line
classification. In a machine learning techniques, two danger of missing their flight. and danger of
sets of data are needed: Scandalous! missing their flight
1. Training Set Scandalous
2. Test Set. @RoelieBreidoos values bit lost
A number of machine learning techniques have been @POL_ASchut The values are some teenagers
formulated to classify the tweets into classes. Machine a bit lost in some teenagers!
learning techniques like Naive Bayes (NB), maximum @AliceAvizandum I am guessing it has
entropy (ME), and support vector machines (SVM) @actuallyalice I'm guessing it something to do
have achieved great success in sentiment analysis. has something to do with with breast cancer
Machine learning starts with collecting training breast cancer risk in women risk in woman
dataset. Nextly we train a classifier on the training
data. Once a supervised classification technique is Table 1:Example of tweet before and after data
selected, an important decision to make is to select cleaning
feature. They can tell us how documents are
represented. Each tweet is assigned Polarity confidence value and
The most commonly used features in sentiment a subjectivity value based on the probability
classification are calculated by the algorithm for each instance on each
Term presence and their frequency class. According the tweet has been assigned polarity
"neutral","positve" or "negative". From our analysis
Part of speech information of 3000 tweets ,approximately around 50% of the total
tweet data are neutral in sentiment(Figure 2). This
Negations
was explained by Bo Pang and Lillian Lee[12] , that
Opinion words and phrases the objective (neutral) sentences of the text are less
informative and thus they filter them out and focus
With respect to supervised techniques, support vector only on the subjective statements in order to improve
machines (SVM), Naive Bayes, Maximum Entropy the binary classification.
are some of the most common techniques used. Here
for our classification we have used Naive Bayes
mechanism.

4.RESULT

In this section we interpret the result of our analysis

by diving it into subsection that relate to the research
question we asked in our introduction.

4.1. Sentiment Anlysis of the Tweets
We used the Rapid miner data mining tools for our
experiments. For analysis, we create an independent
testing set by randomly selecting 20% of the labeled
tweets collected. The remaining 80% is used for
creating classifiers using Nave Bayes algorithm.
. Figure 2 show the histogram of sentiment
distribution of the tweets
Based upon our split of test and training dataset the
accuracy level also differ .Table 2 shows the different
accuracy level based on different splits.

Accuracy 50-50 66-34 80-20
Naive 96.80% 96.85% 98.30%
Bayes
Table2 accuracy level of split ratio.
4.2Topic extraction of the tweets-
To determine the main topics of the tweets using the
Streaming Api,we investigate the hash tag in the tweet
related to the city, We filtered out has tags which are
built from city from city names since they were
already used to find out those tweets and would
automatically be the highest has tags in our dataset.
As the data was collected during end of December
2016 ,the time span of data collection has a huge
effect in topic extraction. In our dataset most frequent
used hash tags are #vacation ,#holiday
,#2017,#2016.There are also very common hash tags
like #news ,#job ,#radio .Another trend can be
detected .Many has tags are related to sports, specially
sport clubs or sport events. The hash tag analysis also
revealed that the tweets contain hash tags of other
cities also. In our dataset we have hash tags of Paris,
Frankfurt even if we collected tweets from
Amsterdam.Furthur investigation revealed that this
may be because some people use those hash tags
when they plan to visit the city. There are also spam
tweets that simply chain hash tags of different cities to
reach a greater audience with their advertisement.
CONCLUSION AND FUTURE WORK-
In the paper, we have presented the process of
classifying sentiment of tweets. We introduced the
idea of using a list of sentiment words plus emoticons
as features to represent and to label tweets for
training data. We also include a neutral classification
of tweets in our corpus. Experiments on tweets
collected from geographic location Amsterdam.
Based on our approach and experimental results, we
observe that the integration of document filtering and
document indexing techniques with our approach
may provide one viable way to the development of
effective systems for tweets analysis.
Our future work includes context based tweet search.
Of course not every tweet containing more than one
hash tag can be classified as a spam tweet. Therefore
to achieve an adequate result an algorithm based
machine learning technique need to be used. Also
size and population of the city could a point of
research from the tweets collected from a geographic
location. To come to an adequate result in this feild it
is mandatory to create a detail analysis of more cities
including all influential factors. By this we hope to
find distinct indicator of activities ,size ,population of
a region.
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