Disease Tracking in GCC Region Using Arabic Language Tweets

Several prior studies have demonstrated the possibility of tracking the outbreak and spread of diseases using public tweets and other social media platforms. However, almost all such prior studies were restricted to geographically filtered English language tweets only. This study is the first to attempt a similar approach for Arabic language tweets originating from the Gulf Cooperation Council (GCC) countries. We obtained a list of commonly occurring diseases in the region from the Saudi Ministry of Health. We used both the English disease names as well as their Arabic translations to filter the stream of tweets. We acquired old tweets for a period spanning 29 months. All tweets were geographically filtered for the Middle East and the list of disease names in both English and Arabic languages. We observed that only a small fraction of tweets were in English, demonstrating that prior approaches to disease tracking relying on English language features are less effective for this region. We also demonstrate how Arabic language tweets can be used rather effectively to track the spread of some infectious diseases in the region. We verified our approach by demonstrating that a high degree of correlation between the occurrence of MERS-Coronavirus cases and Arabic language tweets on the disease. We also show that infectious diseases generating fewer tweets and non-infectious diseases do not exhibit the same high correlation. We also verify the usefulness of tracking cases using Twitter mentions by comparing against a ground truth data set of MERS-CoV cases obtained from the Saudi Ministry of Health.