CML-COVID: A Large-Scale COVID-19 Twitter Dataset with Latent Topics, Sentiment and Location Information

Abstract: As a platform, Twitter has been a significant public space for discussion related to the COVID-19 pandemic. Public social media platforms such as Twitter represent important sites of engagement regarding the pandemic and these data can be used by research teams for social, health, and other research. Understanding public opinion about COVID-19 and how information diffuses in social media is important for governments and research institutions. Twitter is a ubiquitous public platform and, as such, has tremendous utility for understanding public perceptions, behavior, and attitudes related to COVID-19. In this research, we present CML-COVID, a COVID-19 Twitter data set of 19,298,967 million tweets from 5,977,653 unique individuals and summarize some of the attributes of these data. These tweets were collected between March 2020 and July 2020 using the query terms coronavirus, covid and mask related to COVID-19. We use topic modeling, sentiment analysis, and descriptive statistics to describe the tweets related to COVID-19 we collected and the geographical location of tweets, where available. We provide information on how to access our tweet dataset (archived using twarc).