Collecting Non-Geotagged Local Tweets via Bandit Algorithms

How can we collect non-geotagged tweets posted by users in a specific location as many as possible in a limited time span? How can we find such users if we do not have much information about the specified location? Although there are varieties of methods to estimate the locations of users, these methods are not directly applicable to this problem because they require collecting a large amount of random tweets and then filter them to obtain a small amount of tweets from such users. In this paper, we propose a framework that incrementally finds such users and continuously collects tweets from them. Our framework is based on the bandit algorithm that adjusts the trade-off between exploration and exploitation, in other words, it simultaneously finds new users in the specified location and collects tweets from already-found users. The experimental results show that the bandit algorithm works well on this problem and outperforms the carefully-designed baselines.