BDRC/monlamai-transcriptions

Tibetan OCR — MonlamAI transcriptions

3,072 page images of Tibetan dbu-med (u-med) manuscripts with page-level Unicode transcriptions, contributed by MonlamAI over BDRC manuscript scans and aligned page by page.

This is the full page equivalent of the line-segmented datasets available on openpecha/OCR-Betsug and openpecha/OCR-Drutsa, with the following changes:

• filter out cases where not all line in a page are transcribed (so not all the lines in the original datasets are present there), checked manually
• manual filtering on general quality

These changes were implemented by BDRC as part of the BDRC Tibetan OCR release; see the model BDRC/tibetan-ocr, the evaluation benchmark, and the companion synthetic set BDRC/monlamai-handwritten.

Funded by the Khyentse Foundation ("The BDRC Etext Corpus" grant).

At a glance

Images (pages)	3,072
Total size	0.78 GiB
Script	u-med (3,072)
Technology	manuscript (3,072)
Writing styles (script_4)	danyig/pedri (2,459) · druma (590) · multi-script (22) · gyuyig/tsugdri (1)
Source of images	BDRC scans
Source of transcriptions	MonlamAI (page-to-text)
License	CC0-1.0

Contents & schema

One row per page. Columns:

Column	Description
image	embedded page scan (HF Image)
transcription	Tibetan Unicode ground truth
id	unique row id
mw_id	BDRC version id of the source volume
technology	manuscript
script	ume
script_4	writing-style family (danyig/pedri, druma, …)

from datasets import load_dataset
ds = load_dataset("BDRC/monlamai-transcriptions", split="train")
print(ds[0]["transcription"]); ds[0]["image"]

Splits

Single train split (training resource). For held-out evaluation use the separate BDRC Tibetan OCR benchmark.

License, attribution & image rights

• License: CC0-1.0 — use, modify, redistribute freely.
• Attribution requested (not required): please cite the Buddhist Digital Resource Center (BDRC) and MonlamAI.
• ⚠ Image-rights disclaimer: BDRC claims no copyright over the scans, but verifying the copyright status of each underlying original book is the user's responsibility.

Citation

@misc{bdrc_monlamai_transcriptions_2026,
  title  = {Tibetan OCR --- MonlamAI transcriptions (dbu-med manuscripts)},
  author = {Buddhist Digital Resource Center and MonlamAI},
  year   = {2026},
  howpublished = {Hugging Face},
  note   = {https://huggingface.co/datasets/BDRC/monlamai-transcriptions}
}