| --- |
| license: cc |
| task_categories: |
| - text-generation |
| task_ids: |
| - language-modeling |
| pretty_name: ©️ Common Crawl Creative Commons |
| language: |
| - afr |
| - deu |
| - eng |
| - fra |
| - fry |
| - ita |
| - nld |
| - spa |
| - af |
| - de |
| - en |
| - fr |
| - fy |
| - it |
| - nl |
| - es |
| configs: |
| - config_name: default |
| data_files: data/**/*.parquet |
| |
| - config_name: afr |
| data_files: data/**/afr/*.parquet |
| - config_name: deu |
| data_files: data/**/deu/*.parquet |
| - config_name: eng |
| data_files: data/**/eng/*.parquet |
| - config_name: spa |
| data_files: data/**/spa/*.parquet |
| - config_name: fra |
| data_files: data/**/fra/*.parquet |
| - config_name: fry |
| data_files: data/**/fry/*.parquet |
| - config_name: ita |
| data_files: data/**/ita/*.parquet |
| - config_name: nld |
| data_files: data/**/nld/*.parquet |
| |
| |
| - config_name: CC-MAIN-2019-30 |
| data_files: data/CC-MAIN-2019-30/**/*.parquet |
| - config_name: CC-MAIN-2019-30-afr |
| data_files: data/CC-MAIN-2019-30/afr/*.parquet |
| - config_name: CC-MAIN-2019-30-deu |
| data_files: data/CC-MAIN-2019-30/deu/*.parquet |
| - config_name: CC-MAIN-2019-30-eng |
| data_files: data/CC-MAIN-2019-30/eng/*.parquet |
| - config_name: CC-MAIN-2019-30-spa |
| data_files: data/CC-MAIN-2019-30/spa/*.parquet |
| - config_name: CC-MAIN-2019-30-fra |
| data_files: data/CC-MAIN-2019-30/fra/*.parquet |
| - config_name: CC-MAIN-2019-30-fry |
| data_files: data/CC-MAIN-2019-30/fry/*.parquet |
| - config_name: CC-MAIN-2019-30-ita |
| data_files: data/CC-MAIN-2019-30/ita/*.parquet |
| - config_name: CC-MAIN-2019-30-nld |
| data_files: data/CC-MAIN-2019-30/nld/*.parquet |
| |
| - config_name: CC-MAIN-2020-05 |
| data_files: data/CC-MAIN-2020-05/**/*.parquet |
| - config_name: CC-MAIN-2020-05-afr |
| data_files: data/CC-MAIN-2020-05/afr/*.parquet |
| - config_name: CC-MAIN-2020-05-deu |
| data_files: data/CC-MAIN-2020-05/deu/*.parquet |
| - config_name: CC-MAIN-2020-05-eng |
| data_files: data/CC-MAIN-2020-05/eng/*.parquet |
| - config_name: CC-MAIN-2020-05-spa |
| data_files: data/CC-MAIN-2020-05/spa/*.parquet |
| - config_name: CC-MAIN-2020-05-fra |
| data_files: data/CC-MAIN-2020-05/fra/*.parquet |
| - config_name: CC-MAIN-2020-05-fry |
| data_files: data/CC-MAIN-2020-05/fry/*.parquet |
| - config_name: CC-MAIN-2020-05-ita |
| data_files: data/CC-MAIN-2020-05/ita/*.parquet |
| - config_name: CC-MAIN-2020-05-nld |
| data_files: data/CC-MAIN-2020-05/nld/*.parquet |
| |
| - config_name: CC-MAIN-2023-06 |
| data_files: data/CC-MAIN-2023-06/**/*.parquet |
| - config_name: CC-MAIN-2023-06-afr |
| data_files: data/CC-MAIN-2023-06/afr/*.parquet |
| - config_name: CC-MAIN-2023-06-deu |
| data_files: data/CC-MAIN-2023-06/deu/*.parquet |
| - config_name: CC-MAIN-2023-06-eng |
| data_files: data/CC-MAIN-2023-06/eng/*.parquet |
| - config_name: CC-MAIN-2023-06-spa |
| data_files: data/CC-MAIN-2023-06/spa/*.parquet |
| - config_name: CC-MAIN-2023-06-fra |
| data_files: data/CC-MAIN-2023-06/fra/*.parquet |
| - config_name: CC-MAIN-2023-06-fry |
| data_files: data/CC-MAIN-2023-06/fry/*.parquet |
| - config_name: CC-MAIN-2023-06-ita |
| data_files: data/CC-MAIN-2023-06/ita/*.parquet |
| - config_name: CC-MAIN-2023-06-nld |
| data_files: data/CC-MAIN-2023-06/nld/*.parquet |
| |
| - config_name: CC-MAIN-2024-51 |
| data_files: data/CC-MAIN-2024-51/**/*.parquet |
| - config_name: CC-MAIN-2024-51-afr |
| data_files: data/CC-MAIN-2024-51/afr/*.parquet |
| - config_name: CC-MAIN-2024-51-deu |
| data_files: data/CC-MAIN-2024-51/deu/*.parquet |
| - config_name: CC-MAIN-2024-51-eng |
| data_files: data/CC-MAIN-2024-51/eng/*.parquet |
| - config_name: CC-MAIN-2024-51-spa |
| data_files: data/CC-MAIN-2024-51/spa/*.parquet |
| - config_name: CC-MAIN-2024-51-fra |
| data_files: data/CC-MAIN-2024-51/fra/*.parquet |
| - config_name: CC-MAIN-2024-51-fry |
| data_files: data/CC-MAIN-2024-51/fry/*.parquet |
| - config_name: CC-MAIN-2024-51-ita |
| data_files: data/CC-MAIN-2024-51/ita/*.parquet |
| - config_name: CC-MAIN-2024-51-nld |
| data_files: data/CC-MAIN-2024-51/nld/*.parquet |
| |
| - config_name: CC-MAIN-2024-46 |
| data_files: data/CC-MAIN-2024-46/**/*.parquet |
| - config_name: CC-MAIN-2024-46-afr |
| data_files: data/CC-MAIN-2024-46/afr/*.parquet |
| - config_name: CC-MAIN-2024-46-deu |
| data_files: data/CC-MAIN-2024-46/deu/*.parquet |
| - config_name: CC-MAIN-2024-46-eng |
| data_files: data/CC-MAIN-2024-46/eng/*.parquet |
| - config_name: CC-MAIN-2024-46-spa |
| data_files: data/CC-MAIN-2024-46/spa/*.parquet |
| - config_name: CC-MAIN-2024-46-fra |
| data_files: data/CC-MAIN-2024-46/fra/*.parquet |
| - config_name: CC-MAIN-2024-46-fry |
| data_files: data/CC-MAIN-2024-46/fry/*.parquet |
| - config_name: CC-MAIN-2024-46-ita |
| data_files: data/CC-MAIN-2024-46/ita/*.parquet |
| - config_name: CC-MAIN-2024-46-nld |
| data_files: data/CC-MAIN-2024-46/nld/*.parquet |
| --- |
| |
| > **Raw CommonCrawl crawls, annotated with potential Creative Commons license information** |
|
|
| **The licensing information is extracted from the web pages based on whether they link to Creative Commons licenses but false positives may occur!** While further filtering based on the location type of the license should improve the precision (e.g. by removing hyperlink (a_tag) references), false positives may still occur. **See Recommendations and Caveats below!** |
| |
| ## Usage |
| |
| ```python |
| from datasets import load_dataset |
|
|
| # Everything -- massive, you will need streaming |
| ds = load_dataset("BramVanroy/CommonCrawl-CreativeCommons", streaming=True) |
| |
| # Single dump, all languages -- large, you may need streaming on non-server hardware |
| ds = load_dataset("BramVanroy/CommonCrawl-CreativeCommons", "CC-MAIN-2019-30") |
|
|
| # Single language, all dumps -- very large, you will likely need streaming |
| ds = load_dataset("BramVanroy/CommonCrawl-CreativeCommons", "nld", streaming=True) |
| |
| # Single language, single dump |
| ds = load_dataset("BramVanroy/CommonCrawl-CreativeCommons", "CC-MAIN-2019-30-nld") |
| ``` |
| |
| ## Fields |
| |
| In some cases, multiple licenses are found on a single page. All licenses are collected in `potential_licenses`. From these, the "best guess" is selected |
| based on three criteria: |
| |
| 1. location_preference_order: meta_tag, json-ld, link_tag, a_tag |
| 2. head_preference_order: True, False |
| 3. footer_preference_order: True, False |
| |
| Based on these criteria, the "best guessed" license is picked as the one in the `license_*` columns. Potential disagreement between multiple licenses is given in `license_disagreement`. |
| |
| - text: the extracted text (unmodified) |
| - id: WARC-Record-ID |
| - dump: Common Crawl crawl |
| - url: original url for document |
| - date: crawl date |
| - file_path: file path on the S3 bucket |
| - license_abbr: the license type. Possible values: "cc-unknown" (recommended to filter this one out), "by", "by-sa", "by-nd", "by-nc", "by-nc-sa", "by-nc-nd", "zero", "certification", "mark". If multiple licenses were found (`potential_licenses`) |
| - license_version: the license version, e.g. "4.0" |
| - license_location: the location where the license was found. Possible values: "meta_tag", "json-ld", "link_tag", "a_tag" |
| - license_in_head: whether the license was found inside a `head` HTML element |
| - license_in_footer: whether the license was found inside a `footer` HTML element, or an HTML element that had `footer` in the ID or class name |
| - potential_licenses: |
| - abbr: list of all found license abbreviations |
| - version: list of all found license versions |
| - location: list of all found license locations |
| - in_head: list of whether licenses were found in the head |
| - in_footer: list of whether licenses were found in a footer |
| - license_parse_error: whether there was a problem when trying to extract the license, e.g. an unparseable HTML document |
| - license_disagreement: whether the `potential_licenses["abbr"]` disagree, i.e., different types of licenses were found. License *versions* are not included in the comparison! |
| - language: the language, as detected by glotlid |
| - language_score: the language identification confidence score |
| - found_in_fw: whether this sample was found in FineWeb(-2). For non-English, crawls that are more recent than FW2 (everything after 2024-18) is marked as None. For English, crawls that are more recent than FW v1.3 is marked as None (after 2024-51). |
| |
| |
| ## Progress |
| |
| The attempt is to at least process all five RedPyjama crawls + `CC-MAIN-2019-30`. |
| |
| Done: |
| |
| - CC-MAIN-2019-30 |
| - CC-MAIN-2020-05 |
| - CC-MAIN-2023-06 |
| - CC-MAIN-2024-51 |
| - CC-MAIN-2024-46 |
| |
| Running: |
| |
| - CC-MAIN-2021-04 |
| - CC-MAIN-2022-05 |
| - CC-MAIN-2025-05 |
| |
| ## Languages |
| |
| The following languages are included. |
| |
| - Afrikaans: afr |
| - German: deu |
| - English: eng |
| - French: fra |
| - Frysian: fry |
| - Italian: ita |
| - Dutch: nld |
| - Spanish: spa |
| |
| |
| ## Recommendations and Caveats |
| |
| - Raw CommonCrawl data is processed in an attempt to extract licensing information. No quality filtering is done!! It is **highly** recommended to filter this data further on quality, fluency, toxicity, etc. |
| - Similarly, the data has **not been deduplicated**. |
| - The licenses include all possible Creative Commons licenses, including non-commercial ones. Take care about what kind of data you wish to use, and filter out non-commercial licenses when needed. |
| - The column `license_disagreement` indicates whether multiple licenses were found that have not the same abbreviation, e.g. `cc-by` and `cc-by-nc`. It is recommended to filter these out. |
| - The column `license_parse_error` indicates whether an error occurred when parsing the license. You probably want to filter out documents where this was the case, though this should be extremely rare. |
| - Unsurpisingly, the data contains a lot of Wikipedia/Wikimedia content. Depending on what you need, you may wish to filter those out. For Wikipedia specifically, you may opt to use the more thoroughly parsed (but potentially more outdated) [wikimedia/wikipedia](https://huggingface.co/datasets/wikimedia/wikipedia) set. |
| - In exceptional cases, a link to creativecommons.org is found but the exact license could not be found. These are under `license_abbr="cc-unknown"` which you may wish to filter out. |
| |
| |
| Recommendation: |
| |
| ```python |
| from datasets import load_dataset |
| |
| |
| ds = load_dataset("BramVanroy/CommonCrawl-CreativeCommons", "CC-MAIN-2019-30", split="train") |
| ds = ds.filter( |
| lambda x: ( |
| (not x["license_disagreement"]) and # Only use pages with a consistent license |
| x["found_in_fw"] and # Only use pages that are in FineWeb(-2) |
| "nc" not in x["license_abbr"] and # Exclude non-commercial licenses |
| x["license_abbr"] != "cc-unknown" and # Exclude unknown licenses |
| "wiki" not in x["url"] # Exclude Wiki-like pages (best to get those from a more reliable parser) |
| ), |
| num_proc=16 |
| ) |
| ``` |
| |
|
|
| ## Citation |
|
|
| ```bibtex |
| @software{Vanroy_CommonCrawl-CreativeCommons_2025, |
| author = {Vanroy, Bram}, |
| license = {GPL-3.0}, |
| month = feb, |
| title = {{CommonCrawl-CreativeCommons}}, |
| url = {https://github.com/BramVanroy/CommonCrawl-CreativeCommons}, |
| version = {1.3.0}, |
| year = {2025} |
| } |
| ``` |
|
|
|
|
| ## Acknowledgments |
|
|
| - The [Common Crawl](https://commoncrawl.org/) non-profit organization. |
| - [TNO](https://www.tno.nl/nl/), who funded the work hours to accomplish this code. They intend to use (parts of) [the generated material](https://huggingface.co/datasets/BramVanroy/CommonCrawl-CreativeCommons) for the [GPT-NL project](https://gpt-nl.nl/). |
| - [Flemish Supercomputer Center](https://www.vscentrum.be/) for part of the compute under grant 2024-107 |
| - Guilherme Penedo ([@guipenedo](https://huggingface.co/guipenedo)) and the rest of the [FineWeb](https://huggingface.co/datasets/HuggingFaceFW/fineweb) and [datatrove](https://github.com/huggingface/datatrove) team for the help and insights |
| - ML6 and specifically Robin Van Craenenbroek for their [Fondant Creative Commons](https://github.com/ml6team/fondant-usecase-filter-creative-commons/tree/add-fondant-usecase-cc-image-extraction) filter for image datasets. While my approach is different, their code did serve as inspiration. |
|
|
