Tracking geographical locations using a geo-aware topic model for analyzing social media data

•Online discussions can be tracked geographically over time.•A distributed geo-aware streaming LDA (SLDA) model has been developed.•Evaluation was performed during the 2016 American presidential primary elections.•It was shown that locations correlated with the actual election locations.•SLDA was shown to be an effective model for tracking topics and geographical trends.

Tracking how discussion topics evolve in social media and where these topics are discussed geographically over time has the potential to provide useful information for many different purposes. In crisis management, knowing a specific topic's current geographical location could provide vital information to where, or even which, resources should be allocated. This paper describes an attempt to track online discussions geographically over time. A distributed geo-aware streaming latent Dirichlet allocation model was developed for the purpose of recognizing topics' locations in unstructured text. To evaluate the model it has been implemented and used for automatic discovery and geographical tracking of election topics during parts of the 2016 American presidential primary elections. It was shown that the locations correlated with the actual election locations, and that the model provides a better geolocation classification compared to using a keyword-based approach.