Version 1
: Received: 8 July 2020 / Approved: 9 July 2020 / Online: 9 July 2020 (07:25:19 CEST)
How to cite:
Hamoui, B.; Alashaikh, A.; Alanazi, E. What Are COVID-19 Arabic Tweeters Talking About?. Preprints2020, 2020070172. https://doi.org/10.20944/preprints202007.0172.v1
Hamoui, B.; Alashaikh, A.; Alanazi, E. What Are COVID-19 Arabic Tweeters Talking About?. Preprints 2020, 2020070172. https://doi.org/10.20944/preprints202007.0172.v1
Hamoui, B.; Alashaikh, A.; Alanazi, E. What Are COVID-19 Arabic Tweeters Talking About?. Preprints2020, 2020070172. https://doi.org/10.20944/preprints202007.0172.v1
APA Style
Hamoui, B., Alashaikh, A., & Alanazi, E. (2020). What Are COVID-19 Arabic Tweeters Talking About?. Preprints. https://doi.org/10.20944/preprints202007.0172.v1
Chicago/Turabian Style
Hamoui, B., Abdulaziz Alashaikh and Eisa Alanazi. 2020 "What Are COVID-19 Arabic Tweeters Talking About?" Preprints. https://doi.org/10.20944/preprints202007.0172.v1
Abstract
The new coronavirus outbreak (COVID-19) has swept the world since December 2019 posing a global threat to all countries and communities on the planet. Information about the outbreak has been rapidly spreading on different social media platforms in unprecedented level. As it continues to spread in different countries, people tend to increasingly share information and stay up-to-date with the latest news. It is crucial to capture the discussions and conversations happening on social media to better understand human behavior during pandemics and alter possible strategies to combat the pandemic. In this work, we analyze the Arabic content of Twitter to capture the main discussed topics among Arabic users. We utilize Non-negative Matrix Factorization (NMF) to discover main issues and topics based on a dataset of Arabic tweets from early January to the end of April, and identify the most frequent unigrams, bigrams, and trigrams of the tweets. The final discovered topics are then presented and discussed which can be roughly classified into COVID-19 origin topics, prevention measures in different Arabic countries, prayers and supplications, news and reports, and finally topics related to preventing the spread of the disease such as curfew and quarantine. To our best knowledge, this is the first work addressing the issue of detecting COVID-19 related topics from Arabic tweets.
Keywords
COVID-19; Twitter; Topic Discovery; Arabic
Subject
Public Health and Healthcare, Public Health and Health Services
Copyright:
This is an open access article distributed under the Creative Commons Attribution License which permits unrestricted use, distribution, and reproduction in any medium, provided the original work is properly cited.
