  Principal component analysis (PCA) and related techniques have been
successfully employed in natural language processing. Text mining applications
in the age of the online social media (OSM) face new challenges due to
properties specific to these use cases (e.g. spelling issues specific to texts
posted by users, the presence of spammers and bots, service announcements,
etc.). In this paper, we employ a Robust PCA technique to separate typical
outliers and highly localized topics from the low-dimensional structure present
in language use in online social networks. Our focus is on identifying
geospatial features among the messages posted by the users of the Twitter
microblogging service. Using a dataset which consists of over 200 million
geolocated tweets collected over the course of a year, we investigate whether
the information present in word usage frequencies can be used to identify
regional features of language use and topics of interest. Using the PCA pursuit
method, we are able to identify important low-dimensional features, which
constitute smoothly varying functions of the geographic location.
