Do people communicate about their whereabouts? Investigating the relation between user-generated text messages and Foursquare check-in places

Abstract

The social functionality of places (e.g. school, restaurant) partly determines human behaviors and reflects a region's functional configuration. Semantic descriptions of places are thus valuable to a range of studies of humans and geographic spaces. Assuming their potential impacts on human verbalization behaviors, one possibility is to link the functions of places to verbal representations such as users' postings in location-based social networks (LBSNs). In this study, we examine whether the heterogeneous user-generated text snippets found in LBSNs reliably reflect the semantic concepts attached with check-in places. We investigate Foursquare because its available categorization hierarchy provides rich a-priori semantic knowledge about its check-in places, which enables a reliable verification of the semantic concepts identified from user-generated text snippets. A latent semantic analysis is conducted on a large Foursquare check-in dataset. The results confirm that attached text messages can represent semantic concepts by demonstrating their large correspondence to the official Foursquare venue categorization. To further elaborate the representativeness of text messages, this work also performs an investigation on the textual terms to quantify their abilities of representing semantic concepts (i.e., representativeness), and another investigation on semantic concepts to quantify how well they can be represented by text messages (i.e., representability). The results shed light on featured terms with strong locational characteristics, as well as on distinctive semantic concepts with potentially strong impacts on human verbalizations. ARTICLE HISTORY

Emphasising spatial structure in geosocial media data using spatial amplifier filtering

“…Social media feeds like Twitter are related to these, but spatial information is often only a secondary feature and not necessarily at the core of the intended communication (Leetaru et al., 2013; Steiger et al., 2016c). The intrusion of all these digital tools and technologies into our everyday lives has had a profound impact on both society and academia: Our boundaries of privacy have shifted (Tasse et al., 2017), the ways we interact with and communicate places have changed (Kitchin and Dodge, 2011; Kitchin et al., 2017; Li et al., 2018; Poorthuis and Zook, 2013), some people have found new ways to create and curate a digital alter ego including its distinct spatial aspects (Saker, 2017), and researchers from a variety of disciplines have used the outlined novel, often easily accessible information for their research (cf. Sarker et al., 2015; Toivonen et al., 2019; Wang and Ye, 2018).…”

An improved algorithm for dynamic nearest-neighbour models

“…; and they are able to record sound, images, and video. Also, social media provide information about our sentiments as well as verifiable information in the form of georeferenced text snippets (Stefanidis et al 2013, Li et al 2018. We often act and interact by means of digital technology, which makes us leaving digital traces that often incorporate the spatial dimension.…”

Clustering of Copper Flotation Process Based on the AP-GMM Algorithm

“…Clustering has a wide range of applications [2]- [4] and plays an irreplaceable role in our life. In [3], the relation between user-generated text messages and foursquare checkin places is investigated by a latent semantic analysis. In [4], the methods of artificial neural network and k-means clustering are used to measure the current of insulated-gate bipolar transistor.…”