# ArCOV-19: The First Arabic COVID-19 Twitter Dataset with Propagation Networks

arXiv: https://arxiv.org/abs/2004.05861 · HTML: https://mlsanity.com/paper/2004.05861/

## Key facts

- Cited by 7 papers in the map (data through 14 Oct 2026).
- First posted on arXiv 13 Apr 2020.

## Built on by (most cited first, 7 of 7)

- [TBCOV: Two Billion Multilingual COVID-19 Tweets with Sentiment, Entity, Geo, and Gender Labels](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2110.03664/) (2021)
- [Dataset of Fake News Detection and Fact Verification: A Survey](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2111.03299/) (2021)
- [ArCovidVac: Analyzing Arabic Tweets About COVID-19 Vaccination](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2201.06496/) (2022)
- [Ta'keed: The First Generative Fact-Checking System for Arabic Claims](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2401.14067/) (2024)
- [Comparing Open Arabic Named Entity Recognition Tools](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2205.05857/) (2022)
- [Five Years of COVID-19 Discourse on Instagram: A Labeled Instagram Dataset of Over Half a Million Posts for Multilingual Sentiment Analysis](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2410.03293/) (2024)
- [GLARE: Google Apps Arabic Reviews Dataset](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2412.15259/) (2024)

## Abstract (arXiv)

In this paper, we present ArCOV-19, an Arabic COVID-19 Twitter dataset that spans one year, covering the period from 27th of January 2020 till 31st of January 2021. ArCOV-19 is the first publicly-available Arabic Twitter dataset covering COVID-19 pandemic that includes about 2.7M tweets alongside the propagation networks of the most-popular subset of them (i.e., most-retweeted and -liked). The propagation networks include both retweets and conversational threads (i.e., threads of replies). ArCOV-19 is designed to enable research under several domains including natural language processing, information retrieval, and social computing. Preliminary analysis shows that ArCOV-19 captures rising discussions associated with the first reported cases of the disease as they appeared in the Arab world. In addition to the source tweets and propagation networks, we also release the search queries and language-independent crawler used to collect the tweets to encourage the curation of similar datasets.