IRLCov19: A Large COVID-19 Multilingual Twitter Dataset of Indian Regional Languages

TL;DR

This paper introduces IRLCov19, a large multilingual Twitter dataset from India focused on COVID-19, highlighting language usage patterns and providing a resource for researchers and policymakers.

Contribution

It presents a comprehensive COVID-19 Twitter dataset in Indian regional languages, analyzing language distribution and usage during the pandemic.

Findings

English accounts for over 64% of tweets.

Twelve regional languages make up approximately 4.77% of tweets.

The dataset covers tweets from February to July 2020.

Abstract

Emerged in Wuhan city of China in December 2019, COVID-19 continues to spread rapidly across the world despite authorities having made available a number of vaccines. While the coronavirus has been around for a significant period of time, people and authorities still feel the need for awareness due to the mutating nature of the virus and therefore varying symptoms and prevention strategies. People and authorities resort to social media platforms the most to share awareness information and voice out their opinions due to their massive outreach in spreading the word in practically no time. People use a number of languages to communicate over social media platforms based on their familiarity, language outreach, and availability on social media platforms. The entire world has been hit by the coronavirus and India is the second worst-hit country in terms of the number of active coronavirus cases. India, being a multilingual country, offers a great opportunity to study the outreach of various languages that have been actively used across social media platforms. In this study, we aim to study the dataset related to COVID-19 collected in the period between February 2020 to July 2020 specifically for regional languages in India. This could be helpful for the Government of India, various state governments, NGOs, researchers, and policymakers in studying different issues related to the pandemic. We found that English has been the mode of communication in over 64% of tweets while as many as twelve regional languages in India account for approximately 4.77% of tweets.