Identifying twitter location mentions

Abstract

This paper describes our system in the ALTA shared task 2014. The task is to identify location mentions in Twitter messages, such as place names and point-of-interests (POIs). We formulated the task as a sequential labelling problem, and explored various features on top of a conditional random field (CRF) classifier. The system achieved 0.726 mean-F measure on the held-out evaluation data. We discuss our results and suggest ideas for future work on location mention recognition in social media.