Social Media Monitoring of the COVID-19 Pandemic and Influenza Epidemic With Adaptation for Informal Language in Arabic Twitter Data: Qualitative Study.

This study identified two Arabic social media data sets for monitoring tweets related to influenza and COVID-19. It demonstrated the importance of including informal terms, which are regularly used by social media users, in the analysis. It also proved that BERT achieves good results when used with new terms in COVID-19 tweets. Finally, the tweet content may contain useful information to determine the location of disease spread.