Datasets:

PleIAs
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French-PD-Books

file_id stringlengths 10 13	ocr stringclasses 52 values	title stringlengths 2 1.22k	date stringlengths 4 9	author stringlengths 2 112	page_count int64 3 7.07k	word_count int64 0 2.12M	character_count int64 39 13M	complete_text stringlengths 39 13M
bpt6k55771383	100	Des idées napoléoniennes	1860	Napoléon III (1808-1873 ; empereur des Français)	676	43,267	266,537	"\n \nDES IDEES \nNAPOLÉONIENNES. \n \nPARIS. TYPOGRAPHIE DE HENRI PLON, \nIMPRIMEUR DE L'EMPEREUR,(...TRUNCATED)
bpt6k6421291j	100	Catalogue du Musée Rath à Genève	1870	None	110	22,067	131,113	"\nio \n \n \n \n \n \n \n \n \nCATALOGUE \nDU \nMUSÉE RATH A GENÈVE \nGENÈVE \nIMPRIMERIE JULES-(...TRUNCATED)
bpt6k6138136q	96	Rêves et devoirs	1873	Froment, Théodore (1839-1901)	676	27,722	159,481	"\n \nTHÉODORE FVlOdMEVsÇT \nRÊVES ET DEVOIRS \nO mes amis, l'enfance aux riantes couleurs \nBonn(...TRUNCATED)
bpt6k57852716	92	"Adresse de l'assemblée provinciale de la partie du Nord de Saint-Domingue à l'Assemblée National(...TRUNCATED)	1790	None	88	4,390	27,171	"\n \nt >ï \nADRESSE \nDe VAssemblée provinciale de la 'partie du Nord de Saint Dominguë ? à (...TRUNCATED)
bpt6k98000779	77	"Premiere feuille du catalogue des livres qui sont à vendre chez Née de La Rochelle, libraire, rue(...TRUNCATED)	1787	None	10	2,858	14,732	"\nP RE M 1ER E -~ F EU IL LE \n•J? qui font à vendre cher. NÉss DE LA R O CH^^^^ùbmi re, rue d(...TRUNCATED)
bpt6k5768417g	100	Encyclopédie de banque et de bourse. Tome 5	1929-1931	None	2,047	269,970	1,651,178	"\nENCYCLOPÉDIE \nDE \nBANQUE \nET DE \nBOURSE \n \n \nENCYCLOPEDIE \nDE \nBANQUE \nET DE \nBOURSE (...TRUNCATED)
bpt6k9767525w	95	Histoire de Lucie Wellers. Tome 2	1766	None	1,306	50,667	269,815	"\n \n \n \n \nHISTOIRE \nDE \n[texte_manquant] \nÉCRITE PAR UNE DAME, TRADUCTION NOUVELLE DE L'ANG(...TRUNCATED)
bpt6k6560984v	100	Mémoires de Saint-Hilaire. III. 1697-1704	1903-1916	Saint Hilaire, Armand de (1651-1740)	1,096	95,607	563,629	"\n \n \n \n \n \n \n \n \n \n \nMÉMOIRES \nDE \nSAINTHILAIRE \"\n) \nPUBLIÉS \nP 0, U R LA SOCIÉ(...TRUNCATED)
bpt6k11853236	89	"Des Calculs salivaires du conduit de Warthon et des accidents qu'ils déterminent, par le Dr Le Roy(...TRUNCATED)	1876	Leroy de Langevinière, Dr	226	17,068	103,087	"\nmmmmrn \n \n \nf \n \n \nTjK \nCalvados ~ s > ! tr: <r .f a i ma \nDES CALCULS S4LWÀIRES \(...TRUNCATED)
bpt6k6204339t	100	L'Abyssinie et sa grande mission	1900	None	166	17,053	102,287	"\n \n \n \n \ni L'AHYSSINIIi i. S, \n> I:T SA (iMAM)i; MISSION \nPAR \nUN CATHOLIQUE FRANÇAIS \(...TRUNCATED)

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🇫🇷 French Public Domain Books 🇫🇷

French-Public Domain-Book or French-PD-Books is a large collection aiming to agregate all the French monographies in the public domain.

The collection has been originally compiled by Pierre-Carl Langlais, on the basis of a large corpus curated by Benoît de Courson, Benjamin Azoulay for Gallicagram and in cooperation with OpenLLMFrance. Gallicagram is leading cultural analytics project giving access to word and ngram search on very large cultural heritage datasets in French and other languages.

Content

As of January 2024, the collection contains 289,000 books (16,407,292,362 words) from the French National Library (Gallica). Each parquet file has the full text of 2,000 books selected at random and few core metadatas (Gallica id, title, author, word counts…). The metadata can be easily expanded thanks to the BNF API.

This initial agregation was made possible thanks to the open data program of the French National Library and the consolidation of public domain status for cultural heritage works in the EU with the 2019 Copyright Directive (art. 14)

The composition of the dataset adheres to the criteria for public domain works in the EU and, consequently, all Berne-countries for EU authors: any publication whose author is dead for more than 70 years.

Uses

The primary use of the collection is for cultural analytics project on a wide scale. It is already in use by the Gallicagram project, an open and significantly enhanced version of ngram viewer.

The collection also aims to expand the availability of open works for the training of Large Language Models. The text can be used for model training and republished without restriction for reproducibility purposes.

License

The entire collection is in the public domain everywhere. This means that the patrimonial rights of each individual or collective rightholders have expired.

The French National Library claims additional rights in its terms of use and restricts commercial use: "La réutilisation commerciale de ces contenus est payante et fait l'objet d'une licence. Est entendue par réutilisation commerciale la revente de contenus sous forme de produits élaborés ou de fourniture de service ou toute autre réutilisation des contenus générant directement des revenus."

There has been a debate for years in Europe over the definition of public domain and the possibility to restrict its use. Since 2019, the EU Copyright Directive states that "Member States shall provide that, when the term of protection of a work of visual art has expired, any material resulting from an act of reproduction of that work is not subject to copyright or related rights, unless the material resulting from that act of reproduction is original in the sense that it is the author's own intellectual creation." (art. 14)

Future developments

This dataset is not a one time work but will continue to evolve significantly on three directions:

Correction of computer generated errors in the text. All the texts have been transcribed automatically through the use of Optical Character Recognition (OCR) software. The original files have been digitized over a long time period (since the mid-2000s) and some documents should be. Future versions will strive either to re-OCRize the original text or use experimental LLM models for partial OCR correction.
Enhancement of the structure/editorial presentation of the original text. Some parts of the original documents are likely unwanted for large scale analysis or model training (header, page count…). Additionally, some advanced document structures like tables or multi-column layout are unlikely to be well formatted. Major enhancements could be experted through applying new SOTA layout recognition models (like COLAF) on the original PDF files.
Expansion of the collection to other cultural heritage holdings, especially coming from Hathi Trust, Internet Archive and Google Books.

Acknowledgements

The corpus was stored and processed with the generous support of Scaleway. It was built up with the support and concerted efforts of the state start-up LANGU:IA (start-up d’Etat), supported by the French Ministry of Culture and DINUM, as part of the prefiguration of the service offering of the Alliance for Language technologies EDIC (ALT-EDIC).

Corpus collection has been largely facilitated thanks to the open science LLM community insights and cooperation (Occiglot, Eleuther AI, Allen AI).