DLocRL: A Deep Learning Pipeline for Fine-Grained Location Recognition and Linking in Tweets

In recent years, with the prevalence of social media and smart devices, people causally reveal their locations such as shops, hotels, and restaurants in their tweets. Recognizing and linking such fine-grained location mentions to well-defined location profiles are beneficial for retrieval and recommendation systems. Prior studies heavily rely on hand-crafted linguistic features. Recently, deep learning has shown its effectiveness in feature representation learning for many NLP tasks. In this paper, we propose DLocRL, a new Deep pipeline for fine-grained Location Recognition and Linking in tweets. DLocRL leverages representation learning, semantic composition, attention and gate mechanisms to exploit semantic context features for location recognition and linking. Furthermore, a novel post-processing strategy, named Geographical Pair Linking, is developed to improve the linking performance. In this way, DLocRL does not require hand-crafted features. The experimental results show the effectiveness of DLocRL on fine-grained location recognition and linking with a real-world Twitter dataset.