Dataset Card for 🌱ZelaiHandi

🌱ZelaiHandi: A Large Collection of Basque Texts. ZelaiHandi, which means "large pasture" in Basque, is the largest collection of freely licensed and clean Basque texts to date (February 14th, 2025), gathered from selected web sources. This collection comprises approximately 660 million words.

The dataset will receive periodical updates.

• v2 (February 17th, 2025): 660M words, 7 new sources.
• v1 (March 4th, 2024): 521M words.

The corpus has been released with the objective of “feeding” Large Language Models. Naturally, models that are not strictly "herbivorous" can also ingest ZelaiHandi.

Dataset Details

Dataset Description

• Size: 660M words (5.8GB disk space)
• Language: Basque (EU)
• License: Various CC licenses
• Curated by: Orai NLP Teknologiak

Dataset Structure

The corpus is released in JSONL format. Each document contains the following attributes:

{
        "id":"unique id for each document",
        "source": "source", 
        "license": "document license", 
        "lang": "eu", 
        "url": "document url", 
        "title": "document title", 
        "author": "document author if known, null otherwise", 
        "date": "publication date in yyyy[-mm-dd[Thh:mm:ssZ]] format", 
        "text": "document content, ready to use raw text. Title text (for news and articles) is included as well.",
        "domain": "document domain. one of ['news', 'administrative', 'wikipedia', 'science', 'subtitles', 'literature', 'videogames']"
}

Source Data

This is a corpus of the Basque language. It contains 659,609,830 raw words (counted by the 'wc -w' command over the text attribute) in 2.26M documents. It was gathered from various web sources and contains data up to 2025/02/13.

The following table summarizes corpus statistics and license information.

source	base url	domain	tokens (M)	license
Tokikom 📝	https://tokikom.eus/bazkideak/	news	187.63	cc-by / cc-by-sa
Berria	https://berria.eus	news	148.62	cc-by-sa 4.0
Hitzak 📝📝	https://hitza.eus	news	83.20	cc-by-sa 4.0
Eusko Legebiltzarra	https://www.legebiltzarra.eus	administrative	83.04	public domain
Wikipedia	https://wikipedia.org	wikipedia	72.83	cc-by-sa 4.0
Argia	https://www.argia.eus	news	18.36	cc-by-sa 4.0
Addi	https://addi.ehu.es/	science	16.36	several cc variants
Opendata Euskadi subtiitles	https://opendata.euskadi.eus/catalogo/-/euskarazko-azpitituluak-filmak-eta-telesailak-euskaraz/	subtitles	16.36	cc-by-sa
GFA	https://www.bngipuzkoa.eus/	administrative	8.71	Custom copyright license⚠️
Zientzia.eus	https://zientzia.eus	science	8.63	cc-by-sa
Susa	https://www.susa-literatura.eus/	literature	5.77	cc-by
BFA	https://jjggbizkaia.eus	administrative	4.34	Custom copyright license⚠️
Zientzia Kaiera	https://zientziakaiera.eus/	science	1.98	cc-by-sa 3.0
Ekaia	https://ojs.ehu.eus/index.php/ekaia	science	1.80	cc-by-nc-nd 4.0
Ikergazte	https://www.buruxkak.eus/bilatu?bilaketa=ikergazte	science	1.61	cc-by-sa 3.0
Game-erauntsia	https://gamerauntsia.eus/	videogames	0.40	cc-by-sa 4.0
Total			659.62

📝 Tokikom is a Basque local media network. The following websites are included in ZelaiHandi: [28kanala, Aiaraldea, Aikor, Aiurri, Alea, Amezti, Anboto, Antxetamedia, Ataria, Baleike, Barren, Begitu, Berriketan, Drogetenitturri, Erran, Euskalerriairratia, Gitb, Goiena, Guaixe, Hiruka, Karkara, Kronika, Mailope, Maxixatzen, Noaua, Plaentxia, Txintxarri, Uriola, Urolakostakohitza, Uztarria, Zarauzkohitza].

📝📝 Hitzak includes a number of local media sources, which are not members of Tokikom network at the time of the current release. The following websites are included in ZelaiHandi: [Hitza.eus, Irutxuloko Hitza, Bidasoako Hitza, Busturialdeko Hitza, Goierriko Hitza, Lea-Artibai eta Mutrikuko Hitza, Oarsoaldeko Hitza, Otamotz, Goiberri].

⚠️ Custom license, allows reproducibility. License text here: https://www.bngipuzkoa.eus/WAS/CORP/DJGPortalWEB/aviso_legal.jsp.

⚠️ Custom license, allows reproducibility License text here: https://jjggbizkaia.eus/eu/pribadutasun-politikea.

License

The corpus is comprised of documents from various sources. All documents included have a free license, but each source has its own license. All documents collected are publicly available under free use licenses in their original website. If you are the owner of any data included in the corpus and you would not like to be reproduced here, please contact us.

Bias, Risks, and Limitations

This corpus may reflect societal stereotypes and biases. Additionally, it could contain explicit language, slurs, and hate speech, particularly in fictional texts from literature.

Previous releases

If you need a previous release clone this repository and get back to a previos release. Following we list the commit ids for the different releases:

• v2: $git checkout main
• v1: $git checkout 1c61663c8361779898472a7eb6ac2c69c775ed5b

Citation

If you use the corpus please cite the following reference:

@misc{ZelaiHandi,
 title    = {ZelaiHandi: A Large Collection of Basque Texts},
 author    = {San Vicente, Iñaki and Urbizu, Gorka and Corral, Ander and Beloki, Zuhaitz and Saralegi, Xabier},
 publisher = {Orai NLP Technologies},
 url       = {https://huggingface.co/datasets/orai-nlp/ZelaiHandi},    
 year = {2024}
}

Acknowledgements

Special thanks to the authors of the texts and to the media that have made it possible to publish their content under a free license.

This work has been partially funded by the Basque Government under grant no. KK-2023/00094 (ICL4LANG).

Contact

• Iñaki San Vicente (i.sanvicente@orai.eus)
• Gorka Urbizu (g.urbizu@orai.eus)