The Ossetian Web Corpus is a comprehensive collection of Ossetian-language texts gathered from three main sources: online news portals, Wikipedia articles, and digitized books. The corpus is designed to support natural language processing (NLP) research and development for the Ossetian language, a low-resource language spoken in the Caucasus region.

Curated by: OssetianNLPWorld
Language(s) (NLP): Ossetian (os)
License: other – see Licensing & Legal Notice below.

Licensing & Legal Notice

This dataset follows the practice established by large web‑crawled corpora such as HPLT and OSCAR:

Original source texts (news articles, Wikipedia pages, books) remain the property of their respective authors and publishers. They are not owned by the OssetianNLPWorld team and are not covered by the CC BY‑SA 4.0 license.
The structured compilation, metadata, and any original annotations created by OssetianNLPWorld are released under the CC BY‑SA 4.0 license.
Users are solely responsible for ensuring their use of the underlying texts complies with applicable copyright law. For commercial use of verbatim excerpts, permission from the original copyright holders may be required.
A notice‑and‑takedown procedure is in place: rights holders can request removal of specific content by contacting the dataset maintainers (see Dataset Card Contact). We commit to responding within 14 business days and removing disputed content in the next release.

Dataset Sources

Repository: https://huggingface.co/datasets/OssetianNLPWorld/ossetian-web-corpus

Uses

Direct Use

This corpus is intended for:

Training or fine‑tuning language models for Ossetian.
Studying Ossetian morphology, syntax, and lexical distribution.
Building text classification, named entity recognition, or summarization systems for Ossetian.
Cross‑lingual transfer learning with other languages that use Cyrillic script.
Pre‑training embeddings or transformers.

Out-of-Scope Use

The corpus contains raw, unannotated text. It is not suitable for tasks requiring token‑level or sentence‑level annotations without additional labeling.
It may contain time‑sensitive or politically charged content from news; handle with care in sensitive applications.
Redistribution of verbatim documents without permission from original copyright holders is prohibited.

Dataset Structure

Data Fields

Field	Type	Description
`title`	string	Title of the document (news headline, Wikipedia article title, book chapter title)
`text`	string	Full text of the document (title + body, separated by `\n\n`)
`category`	string	Thematic category (e.g., Politics, Culture, History); may be empty for some sources
`source`	string	Origin: a news domain (e.g., `alaniatv.ru`), `Wikipedia`, or `Book`
`date`	string	Publication date in ISO 8601 format (empty for Wikipedia entries)
`url`	string	Original URL or file path of the source

Data Splits

Split	Size	Description
`full`	76,599 documents	Complete corpus (~231 MB uncompressed)
`sample`	1,000 documents	Random subset for quick exploration and prototyping

Dataset Creation

Curation Rationale

Ossetian is a low‑resource language with limited digital corpora available for NLP research. The goal was to assemble a large, diverse, and clean text collection that can serve as a foundation for developing language technologies for Ossetian speakers.

Source Data

Data Collection and Processing

News: Articles were scraped from Ossetian‑language news sites (e.g., alaniatv.ru), preserving metadata.
Wikipedia: A dump of the Ossetian Wikipedia (Cyrillic) was parsed.
Books: Selected books in .fb2, .doc, and plain text formats were converted to UTF‑8 text.

Processing steps:

Language filtering – kept documents containing Ossetian‑specific Cyrillic letters (ӕ/Ӕ) in the first 1,000 characters.
Deduplication – removed duplicates based on SHA‑256 hash of the first 1,000 characters.
Text cleaning – removed carriage returns, tabs, empty lines, table‑of‑contents lines, publisher info, and other artifacts.
Empty document removal – discarded entries with neither title nor body.

Who are the source data producers?

News articles: journalists and editors of Ossetian online media.
Wikipedia: volunteer contributors to the Ossetian Wikipedia.
Books: Ossetian authors and publishers.

Annotations

This dataset does not contain additional annotations. It is a raw text corpus.

Personal and Sensitive Information

The corpus consists of publicly available news articles, encyclopedia entries, and published books. No personal user data was collected. The texts may contain names of public figures, but no systematic anonymization was performed.

Bias, Risks, and Limitations

Domain bias: Skewed toward news and encyclopedic content; informal and social media registers are underrepresented.
Temporal bias: News articles cover mostly 2019–2025, which may affect model performance on older or future texts.
Geographic and cultural bias: Primarily North Ossetian dialect and regional topics; South Ossetian and diaspora varieties are less represented.
Quality: Some residual noise (e.g., OCR errors in books) may remain.

Recommendations

Consider domain adaptation when applying models trained on this corpus to other genres.
If a balanced regional or stylistic representation is required, collect additional data.
Use the source field to filter or weight data by origin.

Citation

BibTeX (dataset):

@dataset{ossetian_web_corpus,
  author       = {Arabov, Mullosharaf Kurbonovich and OssetianNLPWorld},
  title        = {Ossetian Web Corpus},
  year         = {2026},
  publisher    = {Hugging Face},
  url          = {https://huggingface.co/datasets/OssetianNLPWorld/ossetian-web-corpus}
}

APA (dataset): OssetianNLPWorld. (2026). Ossetian Web Corpus [Data set]. Hugging Face. https://huggingface.co/datasets/OssetianNLPWorld/ossetian-web-corpus

Glossary

Ossetian – an Eastern Iranian language spoken in the Caucasus, written in an extended Cyrillic alphabet that includes the letter ӕ.
Token – the atomic unit used by tokenizers; based on xlm-roberta-base, the corpus contains approximately 60.3 million tokens (text only) or 62 million tokens (title + text).
Low-resource language – a language with limited digital resources and tools.

More Information

For questions, contributions, or feedback, please open an issue on the Hugging Face repository.

Dataset Card Authors

OssetianNLPWorld (community)

Dataset Card Contact

For questions, takedown requests, or collaboration, please open an issue on the Hugging Face repository:
https://huggingface.co/datasets/OssetianNLPWorld/ossetian-web-corpus/discussions
📧 Direct email: ossetiannlpworld@gmail.com

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