---
language: my
tags:
- OCR
- Burmese
- NLP
- text
license: apache-2.0
datasets:
- minthanthtoo-cs/Burmese-Classics-OCR-RAW
---
# Burmese (Myanmar) Books Dataset – Burmese Classics OCR (Daily Rolling Project)
[](https://www.apache.org/licenses/LICENSE-2.0)
## 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"),
}
```
---
## 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`.
---
## Accessing Data
The dataset can be accessed programmatically from Hugging Face using the `datasets` library:
```python
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.
---
## 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.
---
## 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)
|
---
### 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
---
## 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**
---
## Credits
- The dataset was parsed from Burmese Classics Online.
- Thanks to the original site for providing access to Burmese literary works.
---
## Disclaimer
This is a personal project.
Data may be incomplete, inconsistent, or partial due to the rolling update process. Use for research purposes only.
---