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

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. We then manually-annotated the tweets by veracity to support research on misinformation detection, which is one of the major problems faced during a pandemic. We aim to support two classes of misinformation detection problems 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.