Broadly Improving User Classification via Communication-Based Name and Location Clustering on Twitter

Shane Bergsma, Mark Dredze, Benjamin Van Durme, Theresa Wilson and David Yarowsky

Hidden properties of social media users, such as their ethnicity, gender, and location, are often reflected in their observed attributes, such as their first and last names. Furthermore, users who communicate with each other often have similar hidden properties. We propose an algorithm that exploits these insights to cluster the observed attributes of hundreds of millions of Twitter users. Attributes such as user names are grouped together if users with those names communicate with other similar users. We separately cluster millions of unique first names, last names, and user-provided locations. The efficacy of these clusters is then evaluated on a diverse set of classification tasks that predict hidden users properties such as ethnicity, geographic location, gender, language, and race, using only profile names and locations when appropriate. Our readily-replicable approach and publicly-released clusters are shown to be remarkably effective and versatile, substantially outperforming state-of-the-art approaches and human accuracy on each of the tasks studied.