AlidarAsvarov/dagestan-constitution

Constitution of the Republic of Dagestan — 13 languages

Scans of the Constitution of the Republic of Dagestan in thirteen languages: eleven indigenous languages of Dagestan and the North Caucasus, plus Azerbaijani and Russian. 291 pages of page images across 13 PDFs.

This is the raw scan release. OCR text is not included yet — see Status.

Why this dataset

The same legal document appears here in thirteen languages, which makes it a document-aligned parallel corpus. Several of these languages — Agul, Rutul, Tsakhur, Tabasaran, Lak — have very little machine-readable text available anywhere, and almost no OCR ground truth. All of them use Cyrillic orthographies with extended digraphs and letters (гъ, къ, хь, ӏ, …) that off-the-shelf OCR handles poorly.

The intended uses are OCR training and evaluation for Cyrillic-script minority languages, and — once the text is aligned at the article level — machine translation and cross-lingual retrieval.

Contents

ISO 639-3	Language	Family	Pages	Size	Source
agx	Agul	Northeast Caucasian (Lezgic)	21	12.0 MB	scan
ava	Avar	Northeast Caucasian (Avar–Andic)	25	13.5 MB	scan
azj	North Azerbaijani	Turkic (Oghuz)	17	10.2 MB	scan
che	Chechen	Northeast Caucasian (Nakh)	21	11.8 MB	scan
dar	Dargwa	Northeast Caucasian (Dargic)	25	15.3 MB	scan
kum	Kumyk	Turkic (Kipchak)	21	11.5 MB	scan
lbe	Lak	Northeast Caucasian (Lak)	22	12.7 MB	scan
lez	Lezgian	Northeast Caucasian (Lezgic)	21	34.6 MB	scan
nog	Nogai	Turkic (Kipchak)	22	12.6 MB	scan
rus	Russian	Indo-European (Slavic)	27	0.3 MB	born-digital
rut	Rutul	Northeast Caucasian (Lezgic)	22	12.1 MB	scan
tab	Tabasaran	Northeast Caucasian (Lezgic)	22	12.7 MB	scan
tkr	Tsakhur	Northeast Caucasian (Lezgic)	25	14.3 MB	scan

Total: 13 files, 291 pages, ~177 MB.

Structure

pdf/
├── metadata.csv    one row per PDF: lang, language, family, pages, text_source
├── agx.pdf  ava.pdf  azj.pdf  che.pdf  dar.pdf  kum.pdf  lbe.pdf
├── lez.pdf  nog.pdf  rus.pdf  rut.pdf  tab.pdf  tkr.pdf
└── (one PDF per language, named by ISO 639-3 code)
README.md

The documents subset is served by the PdfFolder builder over pdf/, with metadata.csv supplying the non-PDF columns. There is one split, train, of 13 rows.

Loading

from datasets import load_dataset

ds = load_dataset("AlidarAsvarov/dagestan-constitution", split="train")
ds.column_names          # the PDF column, plus those from metadata.csv
ds[0]["lang"]            # 'agx'

The metadata columns are lang, language, family, pages, and text_source. The PDF itself is loaded as a pdfplumber object via the Pdf feature.

Requires datasets >= 3.5.0 and pdfplumber:

pip install "datasets[pdfs]"

To fetch the raw PDFs without the datasets library:

hf download AlidarAsvarov/dagestan-constitution --repo-type dataset --local-dir .

from huggingface_hub import snapshot_download

path = snapshot_download("AlidarAsvarov/dagestan-constitution", repo_type="dataset")

Per-file caveats

Three things will bite anyone building a pipeline over this, so they are stated up front rather than left to be discovered.

rus.pdf is not a scan. It is a born-digital export from Microsoft Word (2013), 27 pages, with a real embedded text layer — about 115,000 characters, extractable today with pdftotext rus.pdf -. Every other file is a photograph of a printed page with no text layer whatsoever. So Russian is ground truth, not OCR output, and must not be pooled with OCR'd text without a flag distinguishing the two. It is useful as a structural reference (article numbering, section breaks) for validating an OCR pipeline before trusting it on Agul.

lez.pdf has /Rotate 270 on its pages. Renderers that honour the rotation entry produce upright pages; those that ignore it produce sideways ones. It is also physically distinct from the rest: 34.6 MB (roughly triple the others), scanned in October 2024, with no Creator metadata — it predates the rest of the collection and was made with different equipment.

The other eleven were captured with Adobe Scan for iOS in June 2025 and carry its automatic cropping, deskewing, and contrast enhancement. That processing is not reversible from these files; if you need the unprocessed camera images, they are not part of this release.

Provenance

All scans were made by Alidar Asvarov from printed copies held by the Russian State Library (Российская государственная библиотека), Moscow. No third-party scan, image, or digitisation was used.

The specific print edition (publisher, year, shelf mark) is not recorded.

The Russian PDF is a born-digital copy of the official text; it was not produced by the dataset author.

The Constitution of the Republic of Dagestan was adopted by the Constitutional Assembly of the Republic on 10 July 2003.

Licensing

Released under CC0 1.0 — public domain dedication. Two separate things are being licensed, and both are clear:

• The underlying text. Official documents of state bodies, including their official translations, are excluded from copyright protection under Article 1259(6) of the Civil Code of the Russian Federation. The constitutional text and its official translations into the languages of Dagestan are therefore not subject to copyright.
• The scans. Made by the dataset author, who dedicates them to the public domain under CC0. Note that under Russian law a faithful reproduction of a public-domain work does not attract a new copyright, so this dedication mostly serves to remove doubt rather than to waive a right that clearly existed.

Status and roadmap

• Raw PDF scans, 13 languages, ISO 639-3 filenames
• OCR text for the twelve scanned languages
• pages config — one row per page: lang, page_no, image, text, text_source (ocr | born_digital), ocr_engine
• documents config — one row per language: full text plus document metadata
• Article-level alignment across all thirteen languages (article_id)

When the text lands, it will be added to this repository as additional configs rather than as a separate dataset, so that load_dataset(repo, "pages") fetches only the text and never pulls these PDFs.

Limitations

The OCR text, when it arrives, will be machine-generated and unverified for eleven of the twelve scanned languages; treat it as noisy until a native-speaker pass says otherwise. Page counts differ across languages (17 to 27) because typesetting differs, not because content is missing — but this has not been verified article by article, and no such alignment claim is made yet.

This is a single legal document in a formal register. It is not a general-purpose language sample, and a model trained only on it will reflect the vocabulary and syntax of constitutional prose.

Citation

@misc{asvarov2026dagestan,
  title        = {Constitution of the Republic of Dagestan: scans in 13 languages},
  author       = {Asvarov, Alidar},
  year         = {2026},
  publisher    = {Hugging Face},
  howpublished = {\url{https://huggingface.co/datasets/AlidarAsvarov/dagestan-constitution}}
}