Along with COVID-19 pandemic we are also fighting an `infodemic'. Fake news and rumors are rampant on social media. Believing in rumors can cause significant harm. This is further exacerbated at the time of a pandemic. To tackle this, we curate and release a manually annotated dataset of 10,700 social media posts and articles of real and fake news on COVID-19. We benchmark the annotated dataset with four machine learning baselines - Decision Tree, Logistic Regression , Gradient Boost , and Support Vector Machine (SVM). We obtain the best performance of 93.46\% F1-score with SVM.

India

Context The dataset contains the list of COVID Fake News/Claims which is shared all over the internet. Content Headlines: String attribute consisting of the headlines/fact shared. Outcome: It is binary data where 0 means the headline is fake and 1 means that it is true. Inspiration In many research portals, there was this common question in which the combined fake news dataset is available or not. This led to the publication of this dataset.

MM-COVID is a dataset for fake news detection related to COVID-19. This dataset provides the multilingual fake news and the relevant social context. It contains 3,981 pieces of fake news content and 7,192 trustworthy information from English, Spanish, Portuguese, Hindi, French and Italian, 6 different languages.

The dataset contains fake and real news. There are 16898 unique rows that points out the numbers of news as well. The dataset is merged from two datasets one is from different source of CBC news (link: https://zenodo.org/record/4722470) and other is from different web portals (link: https://zenodo.org/record/4282522).

Data Description:

Text: Text contains the news that is either fake or real.

Outcome: Contains either fake or real which is the status of the news.

Abstract

JHU Coronavirus COVID-19 Global Cases, by country

Documentation

PHS is updating the Coronavirus Global Cases dataset weekly, Monday, Wednesday and Friday from Cloud Marketplace.

This data comes from the data repository for the 2019 Novel Coronavirus Visual Dashboard operated by the Johns Hopkins University Center for Systems Science and Engineering (JHU CSSE). This database was created in response to the Coronavirus public health emergency to track reported cases in real-time. The data include the location and number of confirmed COVID-19 cases, deaths, and recoveries for all affected countries, aggregated at the appropriate province or state. It was developed to enable researchers, public health authorities and the general public to track the outbreak as it unfolds. Additional information is available in the blog post.

Visual Dashboard (desktop): https://www.arcgis.com/apps/opsdashboard/index.html#/bda7594740fd40299423467b48e9ecf6

Section 2

Included Data Sources are:

• World Health Organization (WHO): https://www.who.int/
• DXY.cn. Pneumonia. 2020. http://3g.dxy.cn/newh5/view/pneumonia.
• BNO News: https://bnonews.com/index.php/2020/02/the-latest-coronavirus-cases/
• National Health Commission of the People’s Republic of China (NHC): http://www.nhc.gov.cn/xcs/yqtb/list_gzbd.shtml
• China CDC (CCDC): http://weekly.chinacdc.cn/news/TrackingtheEpidemic.htm
• Hong Kong Department of Health: https://www.chp.gov.hk/en/features/102465.html
• Macau Government: https://www.ssm.gov.mo/portal/
• Taiwan CDC: https://sites.google.com/cdc.gov.tw/2019ncov/taiwan?authuser=0
• US CDC: https://www.cdc.gov/coronavirus/2019-ncov/index.html
• Government of Canada: https://www.canada.ca/en/public-health/services/diseases/coronavirus.html
• Australia Government Department of Health: https://www.health.gov.au/news/coronavirus-update-at-a-glance
• European Centre for Disease Prevention and Control (ECDC): https://www.ecdc.europa.eu/en/geographical-distribution-2019-ncov-cases
• Ministry of Health Singapore (MOH): https://www.moh.gov.sg/covid-19
• Italy Ministry of Health: http://www.salute.gov.it/nuovocoronavirus
• 1Point3Arces: https://coronavirus.1point3acres.com/en
• WorldoMeters: https://www.worldometers.info/coronavirus/

%3C!-- --%3E

Section 3

**Terms of Use: **

This GitHub repo and its contents herein, including all data, mapping, and analysis, copyright 2020 Johns Hopkins University, all rights reserved, is provided to the public strictly for educational and academic research purposes. The Website relies upon publicly available data from multiple sources, that do not always agree. The Johns Hopkins University hereby disclaims any and all representations and warranties with respect to the Website, including accuracy, fitness for use, and merchantability. Reliance on the Website for medical guidance or use of the Website in commerce is strictly prohibited.

Section 4

**U.S. county-level characteristics relevant to COVID-19 **

Chin, Kahn, Krieger, Buckee, Balsari and Kiang (forthcoming) show that counties differ significantly in biological, demographic and socioeconomic factors that are associated with COVID-19 vulnerability. A range of publicly available county-specific data identifying these key factors, guided by international experiences and consideration of epidemiological parameters of importance, have been combined by the authors and are available for use:

https://github.com/mkiang/county_preparedness/

The United States of America

A global study conducted in March 2020 gathered data on consumers' attitudes to, experiences of, and issues with news consumption regarding the coronavirus pandemic, and found that 74 percent of respondents were concerned about the amount of fake news being spread about the virus, which would impede their efforts to find out the facts that they need to stay updated. Others were met with challenges when seeking out trustworthy and reliable information, and 85 percent felt that the public should be given more coronavirus news and updates from scientists and less from politicians.

As the United States battles the coronavirus, news consumers across the country have been attempting to keep themselves updated with how the pandemic is progressing, and a survey held in March 2020 revealed that the most trusted news source for details on COVID-19 was the CDC, with 85 percent of respondents saying that they trusted the centers to provide accurate information on the topic. Following closely behind was the World Health Organization and then the state government, but just 25 percent of consumers said that they trusted social media sites to publish reliable and accurate news about the coronavirus outbreak.

This dataset contains news articles from Swedish news sites during the covid-19 corona pandemic 2020–2021. The purpose was to develop and test new methods for collection and analyses of large news corpora by computational means. In total, there are 677,151 articles collected from 19 news sites during 2020-01-01 to 2021-04-26. The articles were collected by scraping all links on the homepages and main sections of each site every two hours, day and night.

The dataset also includes about 45 million timestamps at which the articles were present on the front pages (homepages and main sections of each news site, such as domestic news, sports, editorials, etc.). This allows for detailed analysis of what articles any reader likely was exposed to when visiting a news site. The time resolution is (as stated previously) two hours, meaning that you can detect changes in which articles were on the front pages every two hours.

The 19 news sites are aftonbladet.se, arbetet.se, da.se, di.se, dn.se, etc.se, expressen.se, feministisktperspektiv.se, friatider.se, gp.se, nyatider.se, nyheteridag.se, samnytt.se, samtiden.nu, svd.se, sverigesradio.se, svt.se, sydsvenskan.se and vlt.se.

Due to copyright, the full text is not available but instead transformed into a document-term matrix (in long format) which contains the frequency of all words for each article (in total, 80 million words). Each article also includes extensive metadata that was extracted from the articles themselves (URL, document title, article heading, author, publish date, edit date, language, section, tags, category) and metadata that was inferred by simple heuristic algorithms (page type, article genre, paywall).

The dataset consists of the following: article_metadata.csv (53 MB): The file contains information about each news article, one article per row. In total, there are 677,151 observations and 17 variables.

article_text.csv (236 MB): The file contains the id of each news article and how many times (count) a specific word occurs in the news article. The file contains 80,090,784 observations and 3 variables in long format.

frontpage_timestamps.csv (175 MB): The file contains when each news article was found on the front page (homepage and main sections) of the news sites. The file contains 45,337,740 observations and 4 variables in long format.

More information about the content in the files is found in the README-file. In it you will also find the R-script for using the data.

Coronavirus disease 2019 (COVID19) time series that lists confirmed cases, reported deaths, and reported recoveries. Data is broken down by country (and sometimes by sub-region).

Coronavirus disease (COVID19) is caused by severe acute respiratory syndrome Coronavirus 2 (SARSCoV2) and has had an effect worldwide. On March 11, 2020, the World Health Organization (WHO) declared it a pandemic, currently indicating more than 118,000 cases of coronavirus disease in more than 110 countries and territories around the world.

This dataset contains the latest news related to Covid-19 and it was fetched with the help of Newsdata.io news API.

According to the most recently available data, around one third of Americans feel very confident in their ability to check the accuracy of news stories regarding coronavirus. In an online survey conducted in April 2020, 28 percent of respondents stated they would know how to confirm the accuracy of news and information regarding the COVID-19 pandemic. The majority of participants expressed a moderate level of self confidence in their capacity to fact check, with 49 percent somewhat confident.

Free dataset from news/message boards/blogs about CoronaVirus (4 month of data - 5.2M posts). The time frame of the data is Dec/2019 - March/2020. The posts are in English mentioning at least one of the following: "Covid" OR CoronaVirus OR "Corona Virus".

Context The World Health Organization (WHO) declared the 2019–20 coronavirus outbreak a pandemic and a Public Health Emergency of International Concern (PHEIC). Evidence of local transmission of the disease has been found in many countries across all six WHO regions.

Content Coronaviruses are a large family of viruses that are known to cause illness ranging from the common cold to more severe diseases such as Middle East Respiratory Syndrome (MERS) and Severe Acute Respiratory Syndrome (SARS). A novel coronavirus (COVID-19) was identified in 2019 in Wuhan, China. This is a new coronavirus that has not been previously identified in humans, and has since spread globally, resulting in the 2019–20 coronavirus pandemic.

Acknowledgements I'd like to express my gratitude to my instructional team (Essra Madi, Markus Lim, Fahad Alsharekh and Bilal Yousef) for all of there efforts.

Inspiration I hope this data will help the data scientist to get an insight about spreading the (COVID-19) around the world.

License

CC0

Original Data Source: Coronavirus News (COVID-19)

The World Health Organization reported 766440796 Coronavirus Cases since the epidemic began. In addition, countries reported 6932591 Coronavirus Deaths. This dataset provides - World Coronavirus Cases- actual values, historical data, forecast, chart, statistics, economic calendar and news.

The New York Times is releasing a series of data files with cumulative counts of coronavirus cases in the United States, at the state and county level, over time. We are compiling this time series data from state and local governments and health departments in an attempt to provide a complete record of the ongoing outbreak.

Since late January, The Times has tracked cases of coronavirus in real time as they were identified after testing. Because of the widespread shortage of testing, however, the data is necessarily limited in the picture it presents of the outbreak.

We have used this data to power our maps and reporting tracking the outbreak, and it is now being made available to the public in response to requests from researchers, scientists and government officials who would like access to the data to better understand the outbreak.

The data begins with the first reported coronavirus case in Washington State on Jan. 21, 2020. We will publish regular updates to the data in this repository.

According to a study conducted in March 2020, 54 percent of adults worldwide aged between 18 and 35 years old were getting most of their information about the coronavirus pandemic via social media, compared to 25 percent of those aged 55 or above. Major news organizations were overall a more popular source of information about COVID-19, but younger consumers were more evenly split in terms of which platforms they were using the most to keep themselves updated about the virus, whereas older adults were far more likely to turn to major news outlets.

Introduction

There are several works based on Natural Language Processing on newspaper reports. Mining opinions from headlines [ 1 ] using Standford NLP and SVM by Rameshbhaiet. Al.compared several algorithms on a small and large dataset. Rubinet. al., in their paper [ 2 ], created a mechanism to differentiate fake news from real ones by building a set of characteristics of news according to their types. The purpose was to contribute to the low resource data available for training machine learning algorithms. Doumitet. al.in [ 3 ] have implemented LDA, a topic modeling approach to study bias present in online news media.

However, there are not many NLP research invested in studying COVID-19. Most applications include classification of chest X-rays and CT-scans to detect presence of pneumonia in lungs [ 4 ], a consequence of the virus. Other research areas include studying the genome sequence of the virus[ 5 ][ 6 ][ 7 ] and replicating its structure to fight and find a vaccine. This research is crucial in battling the pandemic. The few NLP based research publications are sentiment classification of online tweets by Samuel et el [ 8 ] to understand fear persisting in people due to the virus. Similar work has been done using the LSTM network to classify sentiments from online discussion forums by Jelodaret. al.[ 9 ]. NKK dataset is the first study on a comparatively larger dataset of a newspaper report on COVID-19, which contributed to the virus’s awareness to the best of our knowledge.

2 Data-set Introduction

2.1 Data Collection

We accumulated 1000 online newspaper report from United States of America (USA) on COVID-19. The newspaper includes The Washington Post (USA) and StarTribune (USA). We have named it as “Covid-News-USA-NNK”. We also accumulated 50 online newspaper report from Bangladesh on the issue and named it “Covid-News-BD-NNK”. The newspaper includes The Daily Star (BD) and Prothom Alo (BD). All these newspapers are from the top provider and top read in the respective countries. The collection was done manually by 10 human data-collectors of age group 23- with university degrees. This approach was suitable compared to automation to ensure the news were highly relevant to the subject. The newspaper online sites had dynamic content with advertisements in no particular order. Therefore there were high chances of online scrappers to collect inaccurate news reports. One of the challenges while collecting the data is the requirement of subscription. Each newspaper required $1 per subscriptions. Some criteria in collecting the news reports provided as guideline to the human data-collectors were as follows:

The headline must have one or more words directly or indirectly related to COVID-19.

The content of each news must have 5 or more keywords directly or indirectly related to COVID-19.

The genre of the news can be anything as long as it is relevant to the topic. Political, social, economical genres are to be more prioritized.

Avoid taking duplicate reports.

Maintain a time frame for the above mentioned newspapers.

To collect these data we used a google form for USA and BD. We have two human editor to go through each entry to check any spam or troll entry.

2.2 Data Pre-processing and Statistics

Some pre-processing steps performed on the newspaper report dataset are as follows:

Remove hyperlinks.

Remove non-English alphanumeric characters.

Remove stop words.

Lemmatize text.

While more pre-processing could have been applied, we tried to keep the data as much unchanged as possible since changing sentence structures could result us in valuable information loss. While this was done with help of a script, we also assigned same human collectors to cross check for any presence of the above mentioned criteria.

The primary data statistics of the two dataset are shown in Table 1 and 2.

Table 1: Covid-News-USA-NNK data statistics

No of words per headline

7 to 20

No of words per body content

150 to 2100

Table 2: Covid-News-BD-NNK data statistics No of words per headline

10 to 20

No of words per body content

100 to 1500

2.3 Dataset Repository

We used GitHub as our primary data repository in account name NKK^1. Here, we created two repositories USA-NKK^2 and BD-NNK^3. The dataset is available in both CSV and JSON format. We are regularly updating the CSV files and regenerating JSON using a py script. We provided a python script file for essential operation. We welcome all outside collaboration to enrich the dataset.

3 Literature Review

Natural Language Processing (NLP) deals with text (also known as categorical) data in computer science, utilizing numerous diverse methods like one-hot encoding, word embedding, etc., that transform text to machine language, which can be fed to multiple machine learning and deep learning algorithms.

Some well-known applications of NLP includes fraud detection on online media sites[ 10 ], using authorship attribution in fallback authentication systems[ 11 ], intelligent conversational agents or chatbots[ 12 ] and machine translations used by Google Translate[ 13 ]. While these are all downstream tasks, several exciting developments have been made in the algorithm solely for Natural Language Processing tasks. The two most trending ones are BERT[ 14 ], which uses bidirectional encoder-decoder architecture to create the transformer model, that can do near-perfect classification tasks and next-word predictions for next generations, and GPT-3 models released by OpenAI[ 15 ] that can generate texts almost human-like. However, these are all pre-trained models since they carry huge computation cost. Information Extraction is a generalized concept of retrieving information from a dataset. Information extraction from an image could be retrieving vital feature spaces or targeted portions of an image; information extraction from speech could be retrieving information about names, places, etc[ 16 ]. Information extraction in texts could be identifying named entities and locations or essential data. Topic modeling is a sub-task of NLP and also a process of information extraction. It clusters words and phrases of the same context together into groups. Topic modeling is an unsupervised learning method that gives us a brief idea about a set of text. One commonly used topic modeling is Latent Dirichlet Allocation or LDA[17].

Keyword extraction is a process of information extraction and sub-task of NLP to extract essential words and phrases from a text. TextRank [ 18 ] is an efficient keyword extraction technique that uses graphs to calculate the weight of each word and pick the words with more weight to it.

Word clouds are a great visualization technique to understand the overall ’talk of the topic’. The clustered words give us a quick understanding of the content.

4 Our experiments and Result analysis

We used the wordcloud library^4 to create the word clouds. Figure 1 and 3 presents the word cloud of Covid-News-USA- NNK dataset by month from February to May. From the figures 1,2,3, we can point few information:

In February, both the news paper have talked about China and source of the outbreak.

StarTribune emphasized on Minnesota as the most concerned state. In April, it seemed to have been concerned more.

Both the newspaper talked about the virus impacting the economy, i.e, bank, elections, administrations, markets.

Washington Post discussed global issues more than StarTribune.

StarTribune in February mentioned the first precautionary measurement: wearing masks, and the uncontrollable spread of the virus throughout the nation.

While both the newspaper mentioned the outbreak in China in February, the weight of the spread in the United States are more highlighted through out March till May, displaying the critical impact caused by the virus.

We used a script to extract all numbers related to certain keywords like ’Deaths’, ’Infected’, ’Died’ , ’Infections’, ’Quarantined’, Lock-down’, ’Diagnosed’ etc from the news reports and created a number of cases for both the newspaper. Figure 4 shows the statistics of this series. From this extraction technique, we can observe that April was the peak month for the covid cases as it gradually rose from February. Both the newspaper clearly shows us that the rise in covid cases from February to March was slower than the rise from March to April. This is an important indicator of possible recklessness in preparations to battle the virus. However, the steep fall from April to May also shows the positive response against the attack. We used Vader Sentiment Analysis to extract sentiment of the headlines and the body. On average, the sentiments were from -0.5 to -0.9. Vader Sentiment scale ranges from -1(highly negative to 1(highly positive). There were some cases

where the sentiment scores of the headline and body contradicted each other,i.e., the sentiment of the headline was negative but the sentiment of the body was slightly positive. Overall, sentiment analysis can assist us sort the most concerning (most negative) news from the positive ones, from which we can learn more about the indicators related to COVID-19 and the serious impact caused by it. Moreover, sentiment analysis can also provide us information about how a state or country is reacting to the pandemic. We used PageRank algorithm to extract keywords from headlines as well as the body content. PageRank efficiently highlights important relevant keywords in the text. Some frequently occurring important keywords extracted from both the datasets are: ’China’, Government’, ’Masks’, ’Economy’, ’Crisis’, ’Theft’ , ’Stock market’ , ’Jobs’ , ’Election’, ’Missteps’, ’Health’, ’Response’. Keywords extraction acts as a filter allowing quick searches for indicators in case of locating situations of the economy,

This dataset contains the results of a sentiment analysis of the headlines of all search results for pieces containing [corona] OR [coronavirus] from 1 March 2020 to 30 November 2021, for 5 media: NRC, Telegraaf, Volkskrant, NOS and Trouw.Headlines were removed from this data for copyright reasons. For the complete data set, contact me via e-mail (reinwieringa[AT]gmail[DOT]com).

The cCOVID-News dataset is a publicly available Chinese text retrieval dataset created from COVID-19 news articles. It contains a collection of text data related to COVID-19, and it is used as part of the out-of-domain evaluation for the DuReader retrieval benchmark.