In this paper, we investigate and evaluate large language models’ capability in location prediction. We present experimental results with four models—FLAN-T5, FLAN-UL2, FLAN-Alpaca, and ChatGPT—in various instruction finetuning and exemplar settings. We analyze whether taking into account the context—tweets published before and after the tweet mentioning a location—is beneficial. Additionally, we conduct an ablation study to explore whether instruction modification is beneficial. Lastly, our qualitative analysis sheds light on the errors made by the best-performing model.

This paper introduces the problem of determining whether people are located in the places they mention in their tweets. In particular, we investigate the role of text and images to solve this challenging problem. We present a new corpus of tweets that contain both text and images. Our analyses show that this problem is multimodal at its core: human judgments depend on whether annotators have access to the text, the image, or both. Experimental results show that a neural architecture that combines both modalities yields better results. We also conduct an error analysis to provide insights into why and when each modality is beneficial.