Datasets:

SlayerLab
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polish-dynaword

We present Polish DynaWord, an openly-licensed, human-authored text corpus for Polish, built as a Polish edition of the Dynaword family (Enevoldsen et al., 2025, arXiv:2508.02271). The corpus follows four principles inherited from Dynaword — open and traceable licensing, reproducibility, per-source documentation, and versioned extensibility — and explicitly treats curation, not raw text collection, as its contribution. Version 0.2.0 comprises 2,490,773 documents and ≈6.22 billion tokens (tiktoken cl100k proxy) drawn from eleven openly-licensed Polish sources, each vetted for a documented legal basis rather than a vague "public domain" claim. Five sources are openly-licensed corpora redistributed via SpeakLeash; the remaining six are fetched directly from upstream — Polish primary legislation (Dziennik Ustaw / Monitor Polski) via the Sejm ELI API, four Wikimedia sibling projects (Wikinews, Wikivoyage, Wikibooks, Wikiquote) via the official dumps, and the ELTeC-pol literary collection via GitHub — each with full per-document provenance. Beyond scale, this broadens the register coverage from encyclopedic/legal/literary-classic text toward news, travel, instructional and quotation prose. We report the construction pipeline, the per-source legal review (including the sources we deliberately exclude and why), and the dataset statistics. The corpus exceeds the 4.8B-token Danish Dynaword in scale while maintaining a comparably conservative licensing posture.

1. Introduction

Large-language-model pretraining for languages other than English is constrained less by modeling technique than by the availability of legally clean text. Many widely-used corpora are assembled from web crawls of uncertain provenance, mixing public-domain works, openly-licensed material, and in-copyright content without per-document accounting. The Dynaword project (Enevoldsen et al., 2025) proposed an alternative: a continuously-developed corpus where every source is openly licensed and that license is traceable to a documented legal basis, with the whole pipeline reproducible and each source individually documented as a datasheet (Gebru et al., 2021).

Polish is comparatively well-served for raw text — the SpeakLeash project has aggregated 800+ Polish datasets — but most of that material carries "conditional" licensing (web-crawl or non-commercial terms) that is unsuitable for an openly-licensed release. Polish DynaWord addresses this gap. Its contribution is not the collection of new text but the curation: a per-source license review, a uniform minimal-filtering pipeline, transparent documentation of both included and excluded sources, and a reproducible build.

2. Related work

Dynaword and the Danish lineage. Polish DynaWord directly adapts the Danish Dynaword (Enevoldsen et al., 2025), itself a successor to the Danish Gigaword project. A key lesson carried over is the treatment of derivative content: the Danish effort excluded OpenSubtitles because subtitle text is a derivative work of copyrighted film/TV dialogue. We apply the same reasoning (§6).

SpeakLeash / Bielik. SpeakLeash is the principal open aggregator of Polish text and the redistribution channel for most of our included sources. We use SpeakLeash as an intermediate aggregator and preserve upstream license/attribution; SpeakLeash is credited accordingly. Crucially, SpeakLeash's redistribution does not itself confer a license — the right to redistribute flows from each source's upstream license, which we document per source.

Datasheets for Datasets. Following Gebru et al. (2021), each source ships a datasheet recording provenance, licensing basis, domain, time range, and the filters applied.

3. Design principles

Open & traceable licensing. Every source must be openly licensed and carry a documented legal basis (statutory exemption or explicit upstream license), not an unexplained "public domain" assertion.
Reproducibility. A single command rebuilds the corpus from source archives (src/build_dynaword.py).
Documented. One datasheet per source; aggregate statistics in the dataset card.
Extensibility. Versioned; new sources and removals are tracked in a changelog, and sources can be added via native fetchers (§8).

4. Sources and licensing

Version 0.2.0 includes eleven sources. For each we record the upstream origin and the traceable basis for its license.

Source	Domain	License	Traceable basis
Polish Wikipedia	encyclopedic	CC-BY-SA-3.0	Wikimedia dumps released under CC-BY-SA 3.0; attribution + share-alike preserved
Polish Wikisource	source texts	CC-BY-SA-3.0	Wikimedia dumps; underlying works public-domain, community-transcribed
EUR-Lex (PL)	EU legislation	CC-BY-4.0	Commission Decision 2011/833/EU; normative acts outside copyright (PL art. 4 pr. aut.)
Polish Parliamentary Corpus (Sejm/Senat)	political/spoken	public-domain / CC-BY-4.0	Official documents outside copyright (PL art. 4 pr. aut.); redistributed by IPI PAN
Wolne Lektury	literature	CC-BY-SA-4.0 / Wolna Sztuka 1.3	Published under CC-BY-SA 4.0 or Free Art License; PD classics + cleared works
Polish Wikinews	news	CC-BY-2.5	Wikinews released under CC-BY 2.5; attribution preserved
Polish Wikivoyage	travel	CC-BY-SA-3.0	Wikivoyage released under CC-BY-SA 3.0
Polish Wikibooks	instructional	CC-BY-SA-3.0	Wikibooks released under CC-BY-SA 3.0
Polish Wikiquote	quotations	CC-BY-SA-3.0	Wikiquote released under CC-BY-SA 3.0
ELTeC-pol	literature (1840–1920)	CC-BY-4.0	COST Action CA16204 release under CC-BY 4.0
Dziennik Ustaw + Monitor Polski	national legislation	public-domain (CC0)	Normative acts not subject to copyright (PL art. 4 pr. aut.); fetched directly from the Sejm ELI API

Because two included sources (Wikipedia/Wikisource, Wolne Lektury) are share-alike, the aggregate corpus is released under CC-BY-SA-4.0, with attribution due to each upstream source and to SpeakLeash as the aggregator.

5. Construction methodology

Provenance. Source archives are obtained from SpeakLeash's public redistribution bucket (speakleash-ds-pub) in jsonl.zst form. The build streams each archive, applies gates, and writes one Parquet file per source.

Filters (intentionally minimal). Consistent with Dynaword guidelines, heavy quality filtering and mixture-weighting are deferred to downstream training; the build applies only:

drop documents shorter than 200 characters;
drop non-Polish text (diacritic-to-letter ratio threshold);
exact cross-source deduplication (SHA-1 over normalized text), with earlier sources winning duplicates;
for OCR-bearing sources, an alpha-character-ratio gate against OCR garble.

Schema. Every document is stored as (id, text, source, added, created, token_count). Token counts are a fast tiktoken cl100k proxy (within ≈1% of a Llama-3 tokenizer); a canonical Llama-3 recount is planned for a tagged release.

6. Statistics

Source	Documents	Characters	Tokens (proxy)
Polish Wikipedia	1,171,897	1.85 B	707.2 M
Polish Wikisource	632,005	1.97 B	801.9 M
EUR-Lex (PL)	243,060	5.98 B	2,378.1 M
Polish Parliamentary Corpus	324,622	4.49 B	1,646.8 M
Wolne Lektury	6,141	0.26 B	103.0 M
Polish Wikinews	24,386	0.03 B	12.1 M
Polish Wikivoyage	13,645	0.05 B	17.1 M
Polish Wikibooks	9,112	0.04 B	15.6 M
Polish Wikiquote	30,363	0.08 B	31.9 M
ELTeC-pol	100	0.05 B	21.5 M
Dziennik Ustaw + Monitor Polski	35,442	1.23 B	486.1 M
Total (v0.2.0)	2,490,773	16.0 B	6.22 B

For comparison, the Danish Dynaword reports ≈4.8 B tokens; Polish DynaWord v0.2.0 is larger while remaining within a strictly openly-licensed source set. The full build completes in ≈4 minutes on 14 CPU cores. The five sources added in v0.2.0 contribute modest volume (≈98 M tokens) but broaden register coverage — news, travel, instructional, quotation and modern literary prose — addressing the encyclopedic/legal skew of the earlier versions.

7. Excluded sources (curation as contribution)

Transparency about what is left out is part of the editorial contribution. Each exclusion records a stated legal reason:

OpenSubtitles (PL) — subtitle text is a derivative work of copyrighted film/TV dialogue and largely unlicensed; excluded on the Danish Gigaword precedent.
Europeana (PL) — an aggregation of items with mixed per-record rights (PD / CC-BY-NC / rights-reserved). The SpeakLeash redistribution does not carry the edm:rights field, so per-record filtering is impossible without external enrichment; excluded pending that work (≈203k docs / ≈5.2B tokens forgone).
1000 Novels (CLARIN-PL) — labelled CC-BY-4.0, but the collection likely includes in-copyright contemporary works; excluded pending per-title verification.
Project Gutenberg (PL) — only 31 Polish books (4.3 MB), near-redundant with Wikisource/Wolne Lektury, and claiming public domain in the US only; dropped to avoid a per-work PD-in-EU check for negligible token gain.

8. Native sources fetched directly from upstream

Beyond the SpeakLeash-redistributed corpora, six sources are fetched directly from their publishers. Direct sourcing strengthens provenance (each document records its upstream URL/identifier), keeps the data fresh, and distinguishes the corpus from a mirror of any single aggregator. Each is implemented as a small, reproducible fetcher under src/.

Polish primary legislation (src/fetch_eli.py). We fetch Dziennik Ustaw and Monitor Polski from the Sejm ELI API (api.sejm.gov.pl/eli/acts), retrieving each act's HTML and converting it to plain text. For v0.2.0 we include acts marked in force over 1990–2025: 35,442 documents (≈486 M tokens). Normative acts and their official drafts are not subject to copyright under Polish law (art. 4 of the Act on Copyright and Related Rights). This adds Polish national law, complementing the EU law present via EUR-Lex.

Wikimedia sibling projects (src/fetch_wikimedia.py). We fetch the Polish Wikinews, Wikivoyage, Wikibooks and Wikiquote from the official Wikimedia dumps, keeping mainspace pages and stripping wikitext to plain text with mwparserfromhell. These contribute the news, travel, instructional and quotation registers (≈77 k documents, ≈77 M tokens combined) under CC-BY / CC-BY-SA, compatible with the aggregate license.

ELTeC-pol (src/fetch_eltec.py). We fetch the Polish part of the European Literary Text Collection (COST Action CA16204) from GitHub — 100 novels (1840–1920, ≈21.5 M tokens) released CC-BY-4.0 — adding modern narrative literary prose distinct from the older texts in Wikisource and Wolne Lektury.

9. Ethics, licensing and limitations

Personal data. The corpus contains only text its sources already published openly or as official record; it therefore includes names and statements of public figures acting in a public capacity (parliamentary speakers, authorities named in legislation, people described in encyclopedic articles). No private, non-public personal data is collected. A notice-and-takedown procedure allows data subjects and rightsholders to request removal from subsequent versions.

License compliance. The release is CC-BY-SA-4.0; downstream users must satisfy attribution and share-alike obligations for derivatives, and attribute the upstream sources and SpeakLeash. Per-source licenses are reproduced in good faith as documented by upstream and by SpeakLeash; we make no independent legal warranty about any individual document's copyright status.

Limitations. (i) Token counts are a tiktoken proxy pending a canonical Llama-3 recount. (ii) Evaluation-set decontamination (n-gram overlap against Polish benchmarks) is not yet applied and is required before the corpus is used to train models reported on those benchmarks. (iii) Deduplication is exact-match only; near-duplicate removal is left to downstream use. (iv) Gutenberg-style PD-in-EU edge cases are handled by exclusion rather than per-work adjudication.

10. Availability

The dataset, per-source datasheets, build/fetch code, and documentation are released at huggingface.co/datasets/SlayerLab/polish-dynaword (CC-BY-SA-4.0). The corpus is versioned; this paper describes v0.2.0.

References

Enevoldsen, K. et al. (2025). Dynaword: A Continuously Developed, Openly Licensed Corpus. arXiv:2508.02271.
Gebru, T. et al. (2021). Datasheets for Datasets. Communications of the ACM.
SpeakLeash / Bielik project. Open Polish text datasets. speakleash.org.
Strømberg-Derczynski, L. et al. (2021). The Danish Gigaword Corpus. NoDaLiDa.
Sejm RP. ELI API — Internetowy System Aktów Prawnych. api.sejm.gov.pl/eli.
Ustawa z dnia 4 lutego 1994 r. o prawie autorskim i prawach pokrewnych, art. 4.

Draft — generated alongside the v0.2.0 corpus release. Numbers reflect the eleven-source build (five SpeakLeash-redistributed + six fetched directly from upstream). Evaluation-set decontamination (§9) is still pending.