Development of a COVID-19–Related Anti-Asian Tweet Data Set: Quantitative Study

BACKGROUND: Since the advent of the COVID-19 pandemic, individuals of Asian descent (colloquial usage prevalent in North America, where “Asian” is used to refer to people from East Asia, particularly China) have been the subject of stigma and hate speech in both offline and online communities. One of the major venues for encountering such unfair attacks is social networks, such as Twitter. As the research community seeks to understand, analyze, and implement detection techniques, high-quality data sets are becoming immensely important. OBJECTIVE: In this study, we introduce a manually labeled data set of tweets containing anti-Asian stigmatizing content. METHODS: We sampled over 668 million tweets posted on Twitter from January to July 2020 and used an iterative data construction approach that included 3 different stages of algorithm-driven data selection. Finally, we found volunteers who manually annotated the tweets by hand to arrive at a high-quality data set of tweets and a second, more sampled data set with higher-quality labels from multiple annotators. We presented this final high-quality Twitter data set on stigma toward Chinese people during the COVID-19 pandemic. The data set and instructions for labeling can be viewed in the Github repository. Furthermore, we implemented some state-of-the-art models to detect stigmatizing tweets to set initial benchmarks for our data set. RESULTS: Our primary contributions are labeled data sets. Data Set v3.0 contained 11,263 tweets with primary labels (unknown/irrelevant, not-stigmatizing, stigmatizing-low, stigmatizing-medium, stigmatizing-high) and tweet subtopics (eg, wet market and eating habits, COVID-19 cases, bioweapon). Data Set v3.1 contained 4998 (44.4%) tweets randomly sampled from Data Set v3.0, where a second annotator labeled them only on the primary labels and then a third annotator resolved conflicts between the first and second annotators. To demonstrate the usefulness of our data set, preliminary experiments on the data set showed that the Bidirectional Encoder Representations from Transformers (BERT) model achieved the highest accuracy of 79% when detecting stigma on unseen data with traditional models, such as a support vector machine (SVM) performing at 73% accuracy. CONCLUSIONS: Our data set can be used as a benchmark for further qualitative and quantitative research and analysis around the issue. It first reaffirms the existence and significance of widespread discrimination and stigma toward the Asian population worldwide. Moreover, our data set and subsequent arguments should assist other researchers from various domains, including psychologists, public policy authorities, and sociologists, to analyze the complex economic, political, historical, and cultural underlying roots of anti-Asian stigmatization and hateful behaviors. A manually annotated data set is of paramount importance for developing algorithms that can be used to detect stigma or problematic text, particularly on social media. We believe this contribution will help predict and subsequently design interventions that will significantly help reduce stigma, hate, and discrimination against marginalized populations during future crises like COVID-19.