---
language:
- en
tags:
- common crawl
- webtext
- social nlp
size_categories:
- 10M<n<100M
pretty_name: AboutMe
---

# AboutMe: Self-Descriptions in Webpages

## Dataset description

**Curated by:** Li Lucy, Suchin Gururangan, Luca Soldaini, Emma Strubell, David Bamman, Lauren Klein, Jesse Dodge

**Languages:** English

**License:** [TBD]

**Paper:** [TBD]

## Dataset sources

Common Crawl

## Uses

[TBD]

## Dataset structure

This dataset consists of three parts: 
- `about_pages`: webpages that are self-descriptions and profiles of website creators, or text *about* individuals and organizations on the web. These are zipped files with one json per line, with the following keys:
  - `url`
  - `hostname`
  - `cc_segment` (for tracking where in Common Crawl the page is originally retrieved from)
  - `text`
  - `title` (webpage title)
- `sampled_pages`: random webpages from the same set of websites, or text created or curated *by* individuals and organizations on the web. It has the same keys as `about_pages`.
- `about_pages_meta`: algorithmically extracted information from "About" pages, including:
  - `hostname`
  - `country`: the most frequent country of locations on the page, obtained using Mordecai3 geoparsing
  - `roles`: social roles and occupations detected using RoBERTa based on expressions of self-identification, e.g. *I am a **dancer***.
  - `individual`: 1 if the page is detected to be an individual, 0 if it is likely an organization
  - `topic`: one of fifty labels obtained via tf-idf clustering of "about" pages
 
Note that the entries in each file are not in a random order, but instead reflect an ordering outputted by CCNet (e.g. neighboring pages may be similar in Wikipedia-based perplexity.)

## Dataset creation

AboutMe is derived from twenty four snapshots of Common Crawl collected between 2020–05 to 2023–06. We extract text from raw Common Crawl using CCNet, and deduplicate URLs across all snapshots. We only include text that has a fastText English score > 0.5. "About" pages are identified using keywords in URLs (about, about-me, about-us, and bio), and their URLs end in `/keyword/` or `keyword.*`, e.g. `about.html`. We only include pages that have one candidate URL, to avoid ambiguity around which page is actually about the main website creator. If a webpage has both `https` and `http` versions in Common Crawl, we take the `https` version. The "sampled" pages are a single webpage randomly sampled from the website that has an "about" page.

More details on metadata creation can be found in our paper, linked above. 

## Bias, Risks, and Limitations

[TBD]

## Citation

[TBD]

## Dataset contact

lucy3_li@berkeley.edu