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Dataset Card for UK Hansard

Hansard represents the official record of parliamentary proceedings across the United Kingdom’s legislative bodies.

This dataset incorporates records from multiple sources, including debates and written answers from the UK Commons and Lords, devolved legislatures (Scottish Parliament, Senedd in both English and Welsh, Northern Ireland Assembly), London Mayor’s Questions, and ministerial statements. Data was sourced from ParlParse, covering Commons debates from 1918 forward and Lords proceedings from the 1999 reform. Each document was processed to preserve complete parliamentary sessions as cohesive units, maintaining the natural flow of debate. All content is published under the Open Parliament License.

Dataset Description

  • Number of samples: 47.91K
  • Number of tokens (Llama 3): 2.01B
  • Average document length in tokens (min, max): 42.00K (1, 439.78K)

Dataset Structure

An entry in the dataset consists of the following fields:

  • id (str): An unique identifier for each document.
  • text(str): The content of the document.
  • source (str): The source of the document.
  • added (str): An date for when the document was added to this collection.
  • created (str): An date range for when the document was originally created.
  • token_count (int): The number of tokens in the sample computed using the Llama 8B tokenizer

Additional Processing

Dataset Statistics

Additional Information

License Information

This dataset is licensed under the Open Parliament License.

While we aim to produce datasets with completely accurate licensing information, license laundering and inaccurate metadata can cause us to erroneously assign the incorrect license to some documents (for further discussion of this limitation, please see our paper). If you believe you have found an instance of incorrect licensing in this dataset, please start a discussion on this repository.

Citation Information

If you use this dataset, please cite: 

@article{kandpal2025common,
  title={{The Common Pile v0.1: An 8TB Dataset of Public Domain and Openly Licensed Text}},
  author={Nikhil Kandpal and Brian Lester and Colin Raffel and Sebastian Majstorovic and Stella Biderman and Baber Abbasi and Luca Soldaini and Enrico Shippole and A. Feder Cooper and Aviya Skowron and Shayne Longpre and Lintang Sutawika and Alon Albalak and Zhenlin Xu and Guilherme Penedo and Loubna Ben  and Elie Bakouch and John David  and Honglu Fan and Dashiell Stander and Guangyu Song and Aaron Gokaslan and John Kirchenbauer and Tom Goldstein and Brian R and Bhavya Kailkhura and Tyler Murray},
  journal={arXiv preprint},
  year={2025}
}