Improving Geocoding for City-Level Locations

Geocoders are needed for transforming a textual location into latitude and longitude coordinates. There are many popular, publicly available, geocoding APIs for this task. As a case study, we use Google's geocoding API for geocoding Twitter users' self-declared locations. Our research shows how additional parameters from the geocoder can be used to identify improperly geocoded locations. Our research helps identify 35% of locations that are improperly geocoded mostly due to noisy locations being matched to a street level address. Removing improperly geocoded locations can significantly improve research that is analyzing population demographics and user's spatial proximity.