Large Arabic Twitter Dataset on COVID-19

04/09/2020

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by   Sarah Alqurashi, et al.

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The 2019 coronavirus disease (COVID-19), emerged late December 2019 in China, is now rapidly spreading across the globe. At the time of writing this paper, the number of global confirmed cases has passed one million and half with over 75,000 fatalities. Many countries have enforced strict social distancing policies to contain the spread of the virus. This has changed the daily life of tens of millions of people, and urged people to turn their discussions online, e.g., via online social media sites like Twitter. In this work, we describe the first Arabic tweets dataset on COVID-19 that we have been collecting since March 1st, 2020. The dataset would help researchers and policy makers in studying different societal issues related to the pandemic. Many other tasks related to behavioral change, information sharing, misinformation and rumors spreading can also be analyzed.