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

Version 159 of the dataset. NOTES: Data for 3/15 - 3/18 was not extracted due to unexpected and unannounced downtime of our university infrastructure. We will try to backfill those days by next release. FUTURE CHANGES: Due to the imminent paywalling of Twitter's API access this might be the last full update of this dataset. If the API access is not blocked, we will be stopping updates for this dataset with release 160 - a full 3 years after our initial release. It's been a joy seeing all the work that uses this resource and we are glad that so many found it useful. 

The dataset files: full_dataset.tsv.gz and full_dataset_clean.tsv.gz have been split in 1 GB parts using the Linux utility called Split. So make sure to join the parts before unzipping. We had to make this change as we had huge issues uploading files larger than 2GB's (hence the delay in the dataset releases). The peer-reviewed publication for this dataset has now been published  in Epidemiologia an MDPI journal, and can be accessed here: https://doi.org/10.3390/epidemiologia2030024. Please cite this when using the dataset.

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. Version 10 added ~1.5 million tweets in the Russian language collected between January 1st and May 8th, gracefully provided to us by: Katya Artemova (NRU HSE) and Elena Tutubalina (KFU). From version 12 we have included daily hashtags, mentions and emoijis and their frequencies the respective zip files. From version 14 we have included the tweet identifiers and their respective language for the clean version of the dataset. Since version 20 we have included language and place location for all tweets.

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 (1,391,655,616 unique tweets), and a cleaned version with no retweets on the full_dataset-clean.tsv file (360,512,374 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 full_dataset-statistics.tsv and full_dataset-clean-statistics.tsv files. For more statistics and some visualizations visit: http://www.panacealab.org/covid19/ 

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. They need to be hydrated to be used.