minthanthtoo-cs/Burmese-Classics-OCR-RAW

Burmese (Myanmar) Books Dataset – Burmese Classics OCR (Daily Rolling Project)

Overview

A daily rolling dataset of Burmese books, built for AI, OCR, and NLP research.
Each entry includes OCR text with metadata: title, author, page index, and Burmese character ratio.

This project fills a critical gap in Burmese-language resources:

• Scarcity of public-domain Burmese text.
• High technical and financial barriers to corpus building.
• Enables incremental, open access for researchers and developers.

Note: This is a personal, incremental effort — updates may be partial. Source: Derived from the largest freely accessible Burmese book archive, fully open and unrestricted.

⚠️ 170 books are actively being fixed due to OCR errors (error logs maintained). 1,999 books contain duplicate entries that are being resolved.

Dataset Format

Data is stored as Parquet shards (~200 MB each) from source JSONL files.

Each Parquet record includes:

• uid – unique identifier, assigned internally by the Burmese Classics Online website
• title – book title
• author – book author
• page – page index (starting from 1)
• burmese_percent – proportion of Burmese characters on the page
• text – OCR text content of the page

1 jsonl line = 1 page (raw OCR output).

features = {
    "uid": datasets.Value("string"),
    "title": datasets.Value("string"),
    "author": datasets.Value("string"),
    "burmese_percent": datasets.Value("float32"),
    "text": datasets.Value("string"),
}

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Dataset Scale (Excluding Predominantly English Categories)

• Total Books: ~18,000 (currently at 2nd parquet - 3,384)
• Total Pages: ~2,000,000 (currently at 2nd parquet - 573,527)
• Approx. Burmese Characters: ~3B (currently at 2nd parquet - 747,255,396)
• Estimated Tokens: ~2B (currently at 2nd parquet - ~374M tokens)

⚠️ These totals exclude categories likely to contain mostly English content: Technical, Newspaper | Journal, and Language.

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Accessing Data

The dataset can be accessed programmatically from Hugging Face using the datasets library:

from datasets import load_dataset

dataset = load_dataset("minthanthtoo-cs/Burmese-Classics-OCR-RAW")
print(dataset)

# Access the 7th entry (index 6)
sample = dataset['train'][6]

# Print metadata and 1.2k text snippet
print(f"Title       : {sample['title']}")
print(f"Author      : {sample['author']}")
print(f"UID         : {sample['uid']}")
print(f"Burmese %   : {sample['burmese_percent']:.2f}%")
print("Text snippet:", sample['text'][:1200].replace('\n', ' '), "...")

• Each shard is automatically loaded as a dataset split.
• The Parquet format ensures fast, columnar access and efficient filtering.

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Processing Notes

• Each book contains ~3k–100k Burmese characters (~2k–100k tokens).
• Only books meeting a minimum Burmese content threshold are included.
• Dataset is rolling: new books are added daily.

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Visualizations (Preview)

(These charts highlight which PDFs provide the most content relative to their file size in MB)

Distribution of Pages per Book

File Size vs Pages (MB/Page)

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Categories Summary

⚠️ Note: The following stats are estimated from 24k parsed PDF metatdata only (out of 36k total).
Numbers may shift slightly once all files are fully processed.

Category	Books	Total Size (MB)	Total Pages	Avg Size/Page	Est Tokens
Technical	1,891	26,909.73	626,402	0.048	212,976,680
Language	4,165	33,951.70	721,935	0.090	259,896,600
Novel	3,770	32,987.31	152,693	0.107	369,517,060
Religion	2,725	40,064.28	441,158	0.107	114,701,080
Knowledge	1,586	19,082.50	113,560	0.117	31,796,800
Business	176	2,165.26	9,976	0.117	2,294,480
Translation	758	11,792.22	65,170	0.122	16,292,500
Martial Art	1,651	25,345.99	146,292	0.126	32,184,240
Mystery	486	6,523.44	18,631	0.130	4,285,130
History	407	6,248.73	32,805	0.148	8,857,350
Health	263	3,830.64	20,831	0.151	4,686,975
Rare	71	1,182.29	3,198	0.150	639,600
Poem	241	2,082.35	10,070	0.161	906,300
Detective	256	3,305.23	10,310	0.202	2,371,300
Textbooks	131	2,281.23	11,332	0.199	3,512,920
Other	408	4,759.20	21,994	0.219	4,398,800
Magazine	364	8,689.53	21,011	0.215	4,202,200
Agricultural	85	447.88	3,237	0.222	647,400
Comic	978	22,719.21	39,699	0.234	27,789,300
Thriller	1,146	10,426.67	47,389	0.103	114,681,380
Lyrics	325	719.00	10	0.800	2,400
Newspaper / Journal	14,472	127,541.61	371,311	0.290	408,442,100
TOTALS	24,240	276,077.47	2,903,645	—	1,628,594,035

Dataset Stats

• Total categories: 23
• Total books: 24,240
• Total size: 276,077.47 MB
• Total pages: 2,903,645
• Pages per MB (global): 10.52
• Estimated tokens: ~1.63B

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License

This dataset is open-source under the Apache 2.0 License, intended to support Burmese AI research and development.

• Allows use, modification, and redistribution
• Attribution required

Apache 2.0 License

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Credits

• The dataset was parsed from Burmese Classics Online.
• Thanks to the original site for providing access to Burmese literary works.

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Disclaimer

This is a personal project. Data may be incomplete, inconsistent, or partial due to the rolling update process. Use for research purposes only.

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