A large-scale COVID-19 Twitter chatter dataset for open scientific research - an international collaboration

Due to the relevance of the COVID-19 global pandemic, we are releasing our dataset of tweets acquired from the Twitter Stream related to COVID-19 chatter. Since our first release we have received additional data from our new collaborators, allowing this resource to grow to its current size. Dedicated data gathering started from March 11th yielding over 4 million tweets a day. We have added additional data provided by our new collaborators from January 27th to March 27th, to provide extra longitudinal coverage. The data collected from the stream captures all languages, but the higher prevalence are: English, Spanish, and French. We release all tweets and retweets on the full_dataset.tsv file (205,409,413 unique tweets), and a cleaned version with no retweets on the full_dataset-clean.tsv file (44,726,568 unique tweets). There are several practical reasons for us to leave the retweets, tracing important tweets and their dissemination is one of them. For NLP tasks we provide the top 1000 frequent terms in frequent_terms.csv, the top 1000 bigrams in frequent_bigrams.csv, and the top 1000 trigrams in frequent_trigrams.csv. Some general statistics per day are included for both datasets in the statistics-full_dataset.tsv and statistics-full_dataset-clean.tsv files. More details can be found (and will be updated faster at: https://github.com/thepanacealab/covid19_twitter) and our pre-print about the dataset (https://arxiv.org/abs/2004.03688) As always, the tweets distributed here are only tweet identifiers (with date and time added) due to the terms and conditions of Twitter to re-distribute Twitter data ONLY for research purposes. The need to be hydrated to be used.This dataset will be updated bi-weekly at least with additional tweets, look at the github repo for these updates. Release: We have standardized the name of the resource to match our pre-print manuscript and to not have to update it every week