The First French COVID19 Confinement Twitter Dataset

Balech, Sophie; Benavent, Christophe; Calciu, Mihai

In this paper, we present a mainly French coronavirus Twitter dataset that we have been continuously collecting since confinement restrictions have been enacted in France (in March 17, 2020). We offer our datasets and sentiment analysis annotations, that have been obtained using high performance computing (HPC) capabilities of our university's datacenter, to the research community at https://github.com/calciu/C0VID19-ContainmentFr. We think that our contribution can facilitate analysis of online conversation dynamics reflecting people sentiments when facing severe home confinement restrictions determined by the outbreak of this world wide epidemic. We hope that our contribution will help decode shared experience and mood but also test the sensitivity of sentiment measurement instruments and incite the development of new instruments, methods and approaches.