LVSTCK/macedonian-corpus-raw

Macedonian Corpus - Raw

🌟 Key Highlights

• Size: 37.6 GB, Word Count: 3.53 billion
• Includes data from 10+ sources, including academic texts, public archives, and online resources.
• Minimal preprocessing applied.
• Examples include academic papers, books, scraped web content, and more.

📋 Overview

Macedonian is widely recognized as a low-resource language in the field of NLP. Publicly available resources in Macedonian are extremely limited, and as far as we know, no consolidated resource encompassing all available public data exists. Another challenge is the state of digitalized books and documents in Macedonia. The country lags behind in this regard, with many books and documents existing only as scanned images. This makes it difficult to extract textual information, which is critical for advancing linguistic research, education, and NLP applications in Macedonian language.

To address these challenges, we created this Macedonian Corpus. This corpus consolidates multiple sources of Macedonian text data, including books, academic papers, web content, and other textual resources (such as PDFs which were parsed using MMORE). This version of the corpus is raw, meaning, the data has been minimally processed, with basic anonymization applied (e.g., removal of emails, phone numbers, and other sensitive information) and it has NOT been deduplicated or filtered for noise.

As this is only version 1 of the corpus, we aim to involve the community in expanding and improving the corpus for future iterations. Contributions could include sending books (in formats such as PDF, DOCX, PPTX, or audiobooks) written in clean Macedonian language or submitting other forms of textual resources that align with the goal of expanding the corpus. If you'd like to contribute or have suggestions for improvement, please feel free to reach out!

Cleaned Dataset: A filtered version of the corpus, cleaned using datatrove (the same methodology as fineweb-2) is available here.

📚 Dataset Sources

The corpus is built by collecting and processing data from the following sources:

Source	Notes	Origin
UKIM	Books and dissertations from various topics	UKIM Digital Library, UKIM Repository
Wikipedia (MK)	Macedonian Wikipedia dump	Wikipedia
MANU	Various publications from MANU	MANU
HuggingFace (fineweb-2)	Macedonian subset of FineWeb-2 (mkd_Cyrl)	Hugging Face
Common Voice (MK)	Macedonian sentences from the Common Voice dataset	Common Voice
CLARIN MaCoCu-mk 2.0	Web-crawled Macedonian texts	CLARIN
UKLO	Resources from UKLO (Academic repository)	UKLO
UGD	Resources from UGD (Academic repository)	UGD
Institute of Macedonian Language	Resources from the Institute of Macedonian Language "Krste Misirkov"	IMJ
SETimes Corpus (MK-EN)	Macedonian-English parallel corpus (only MK sentences used)	SETimes
HPLT-2 (MK)	Macedonian subset of HPLT-2	HPLT-2
Official PE Gazette of North Macedonia	Official Gazette of North Macedonia	slvesnik

Dataset Splits

The corpus is divided into the following categories based on the origin of the data:

Origin	Size (GB)	Words (B)	Percentage
HPLT-2	15.85	1.49	42.21%
HuggingFace (fineweb-2)	14.21	1.33	37.66%
CLARIN (MaCoCu-mk 2.0)	5.20	0.49	13.92%
Other (MMORE)	1.48	0.14	4.07%
Wikipedia	0.78	0.07	1.96%
SETimes Corpus	0.06	0.0044	0.13%
Common Voice	0.02	0.0018	0.05%
Total	37.60	3.53	100.00%

MMORE

A significant portion of the corpus is derived using MMORE (GitHub), a tool for extracting text from PDFs (using OCR) and other document formats (DOCX, MD, PPTX, XLSX, TXT, EML, MP4, MOV, AVI, MKV, MP3, WAV, AAC).

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⚙️ Usage

This corpus is intended to support a variety of use cases, including but not limited to:

• Pretraining or Fine-tuning LLMs: The corpus can be used to pretrain or fine-tune LLMs specifically for the Macedonian language, enabling tasks like text generation, language understanding, and question answering.

• Linguistic Analysis: Researchers can use the corpus to study the morphology, syntax, and semantics of the Macedonian language, contributing to both academic studies and computational linguistic advancements.

• Machine Translation: The corpus can serve as a valuable resource for developing or improving machine translation systems between Macedonian and other languages.

• Document Retrieval and Search: It can be used to build and evaluate information retrieval systems, such as search engines.

The corpus is provided as a JSONL file, where each line contains two fields:

• text: The raw textual data.
• source: The source of the text.

{"text": "Пример текст.", "source": "fineweb-2"}

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🙏 Acknowledgments

We acknowledge the contributions of the following organizations and projects:

• MMORE for text extraction from PDFs.
• Hugging Face for the Macedonian subset of the FineWeb-2 dataset.
• HPLT-2 for the Macedonian subset of their dataset.
• CLARIN for the MaCoCu-mk 2.0 dataset.
• All other sources listed above for their contributions to this corpus.

🤝 How to Contribute?

You can contribute to the Macedonian corpus by:

1. Digitalize Books and Materials:

   • Contribute by digitalizing books, documents, and other materials that are legally in the public domain. These digitalized materials can be used to expand the datasets.
   • Ensure that the materials you contribute comply with copyright laws and are explicitly permitted for public use.

2. Expand Data Collection:

   • Share other forms of Macedonian-language text data, such as articles, essays, or transcripts, that can legally be used for training or evaluating language models.

3. Encourage Institutional Participation:

   • We hope this initiative inspires institutions in Macedonia, such as libraries, universities, and research centers, to take part in the digitalization of Macedonian-language materials.
   • The availability of such materials will enable the development of specialized software tailored to the needs of Macedonian speakers and researchers.

📬 Contact

For inquiries, feedback, or contributions, please feel free to reach out to the core team:

• Stefan Krsteski 📧
• Borjan Sazdov 📧
• Matea Tashkovska 📧

🎉 Special Thanks

Also a big thank you to the following individuals:

• Said Gürbüz
• Vinko Sabolcec

⚖️ Legal

Notice and Takedown Policy

We adhere strictly to copyright and data ownership laws. If you identify any material within the corpus that infringes on your rights, please contact us following the detailed steps provided in this section to have it reviewed and potentially removed.

Citation

@article{krsteski2025towards,
  title={Towards Open Foundation Language Model and Corpus for Macedonian: A Low-Resource Language},
  author={Krsteski, Stefan and Tashkovska, Matea and Sazdov, Borjan and Gjoreski, Hristijan and Gerazov, Branislav},
  journal={arXiv preprint arXiv:2506.09560},
  year={2025}
}

License

Creative Commons Attribution 4.0 (CC BY 4.0)