ArCOV19-Rumors: Arabic COVID-19 Twitter Dataset for Misinformation Detection

Fatima Haouari, Maram Hasanain, Reem Suwaileh, Tamer Elsayed

Abstract
In this paper we introduce ArCOV19-Rumors, an Arabic COVID-19 Twitter dataset for misinformation detection composed of tweets containing claims from 27th January till the end of April 2020. We collected 138 verified claims, mostly from popular fact-checking websites, and identified 9.4K relevant tweets to those claims. Tweets were manually-annotated by veracity to support research on misinformation detection, which is one of the major problems faced during a pandemic. ArCOV19-Rumors supports two levels of misinformation detection over Twitter: verifying free-text claims (called claim-level verification) and verifying claims expressed in tweets (called tweet-level verification). Our dataset covers, in addition to health, claims related to other topical categories that were influenced by COVID-19, namely, social, politics, sports, entertainment, and religious. Moreover, we present benchmarking results for tweet-level verification on the dataset. We experimented with SOTA models of versatile approaches that either exploit content, user profiles features, temporal features and propagation structure of the conversational threads for tweet verification.
Anthology ID:
2021.wanlp-1.8
Volume:
Proceedings of the Sixth Arabic Natural Language Processing Workshop
Month:
April
Year:
2021
Address:
Kyiv, Ukraine (Virtual)
Editors:
Nizar Habash, Houda Bouamor, Hazem Hajj, Walid Magdy, Wajdi Zaghouani, Fethi Bougares, Nadi Tomeh, Ibrahim Abu Farha, Samia Touileb
Venue:
WANLP
SIG:
Publisher:
Association for Computational Linguistics
Note:
Pages:
72–81
Language:
URL:
https://aclanthology.org/2021.wanlp-1.8
DOI:
Bibkey:
Cite (ACL):
Fatima Haouari, Maram Hasanain, Reem Suwaileh, and Tamer Elsayed. 2021. ArCOV19-Rumors: Arabic COVID-19 Twitter Dataset for Misinformation Detection. In Proceedings of the Sixth Arabic Natural Language Processing Workshop, pages 72–81, Kyiv, Ukraine (Virtual). Association for Computational Linguistics.
Cite (Informal):
ArCOV19-Rumors: Arabic COVID-19 Twitter Dataset for Misinformation Detection (Haouari et al., WANLP 2021)
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PDF:
https://preview.aclanthology.org/naacl24-info/2021.wanlp-1.8.pdf
Data
ArCOV19-Rumors, ArCOV-19
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