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.

KEYWORDS:

• Text mining
• latent semantic analysis
• semantic concepts
• Foursquare
• location-based social network (LBSN)

Notes

1. https://developer.foursquare.com/categorytree.

Additional information

Funding

This work was generously supported by the German Research Foundation (DFG) through the priority program “Volunteered Geographic Information: Interpretation, Visualisation and Social Computing” (SPP 1894).

Notes on contributors

Ming Li

Ming Li is an associated postdoctoral research fellow at the GIScience research group of Heidelberg University. She studied Geodesy and Geomatics at Wuhan University in China. After that, she conducted PhD research in the areas of mobile computing, context-aware geovisualization and the analysis of LBSNs at Heidelberg University.

Rene Westerholt

Rene Westerholt is a research fellow at the GIScience research group of Heidelberg University. He is conducting doctoral research in the areas of spatial analysis, geosocial media, and place-based analysis. Prior to his PhD, he studied Geoinformatics at the University of Osnabrück in northern Germany.

Alexander Zipf

Alexander Zipf is a professor and the chair of GIScience (Geoinformatics) at Heidelberg University (Department of Geography) since late 2009. He is a member of the Centre for Scientific Computing (IWR), the Heidelberg Center for Cultural Heritage and PI at the Heidelberg Graduate School MathComp. He is also a founding member of the Heidelberg Center for the Environment (HCE) and is currently establishing the “Heidelberg Institute for Geoinformation Technology” (HeiGIT), core funded by the Klaus Tschira Stiftung. From 2012 to 2014, he was the managing director of the Department of Geography, Heidelberg University. In 2011−2012, he acted as the vice dean of the Faculty for Chemistry and Geosciences, Heidelberg University. Since 2012, he is the speaker of the graduate school “Crowd Analyser − Spatio-temporal Analysis of User-generated Content.” He is also a member of the editorial board of several further journals and has organized a set of conferences and workshops. In 2012−2015, he was the regional editor of ISI journal “Transactions in GIS” (Wiley). Before coming to Heidelberg, he led the chair of Cartography at Bonn University and earlier was a professor for Applied Computer Science and Geoinformatics at the University of Applied Sciences in Mainz, Germany. He has a background in Mathematics and Geography from Heidelberg University and finished his PhD at the European Media Laboratory EML in Heidelberg where he was the first PhD student. There he also conducted further research as a postdoc for 3 years.