PapaChaves 🇨🇷

PapaChaves is a longitudinal corpus of presidential press conferences from the administration of Rodrigo Chaves Robles, President of Costa Rica (May 2022 – May 2026). The dataset contains automatic speech transcriptions of 308 press conferences, covering the full presidential term.

"PapaChaves" was a nickname given to President Chaves that leaked into the press during his administration.

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Dataset Summary

Stat	Value
Videos	308
Total audio hours	351.0h
Total words	2,284,546
Total segments	174,277
Date range	2022-05-24 → 2026-05-06
Language	Costa Rican Spanish
Avg duration	68.4 min
Total views	10,191,069

Year Distribution

Year	Videos	Hours	Words
2022	96	58.1h	340,086
2023	104	108.8h	678,940
2024	51	86.0h	586,594
2025	42	73.7h	522,838
2026	15	24.4h	156,088

Duration Distribution

Duration	Videos
< 10 min	56
10–30 min	49
30–60 min	35
> 60 min	168

Note: The dataset includes not only the formal weekly rueda de prensa (typically > 60 min) but also shorter press interactions, bilateral press statements, and special announcements. Researchers can filter by duration_min or title depending on their use case.

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Repository Structure

PapaChaves/
├── data/
│   └── train.parquet       ← master index with metadata per video
└── transcripts/
    └── *.txt               ← one transcript file per video

Master Index (data/train.parquet)

Column	Type	Description
video_id	str	YouTube video ID
title	str	Video title
date	str	Publication date (YYYY-MM-DD)
publishedAt	str	Full ISO 8601 timestamp
duration_min	float	Video duration in minutes
duration_sec	int	Video duration in seconds
view_count	int	YouTube view count
like_count	int	YouTube like count
n_segments	int	Number of transcript segments
transcript_duration_min	float	Transcribed duration in minutes
n_words	int	Word count
filename	str	Corresponding transcript filename in transcripts/

Transcript Format (transcripts/*.txt)

Each transcript file follows this format:

VIDEO: 🔴 En Vivo | Conferencia de prensa semanal...
ID   : TLm2czHR7Sc
MODEL: large-v3
============================================================

[    6.2s –   12.4s]  Buenos días a todos. Bienvenidos a esta...
[   12.5s –   18.1s]  Hoy vamos a hablar sobre...

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Loading the Dataset

# load the master index
import pandas as pd
df = pd.read_parquet('hf://datasets/ergar/PapaChaves/data/train.parquet')

# filter to full press conferences only (> 60 min)
full_pc = df[df['duration_min'] > 60]

# load a specific transcript
from huggingface_hub import hf_hub_download
path = hf_hub_download(
    repo_id='ergar/PapaChaves',
    filename=f"transcripts/{df.iloc[0]['filename']}",
    repo_type='dataset'
)
with open(path, encoding='utf-8') as f:
    print(f.read()[:500])

Or with the datasets library:

from datasets import load_dataset
ds = load_dataset('ergar/PapaChaves')

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Data Collection Pipeline

1. Source — Official YouTube channel of the Presidencia de la República de Costa Rica
2. Download — yt-dlp with 16kHz mono WAV conversion via ffmpeg
3. Transcription — WhisperX with large-v3 model, forced word-level alignment
4. Language — es (Spanish), with Costa Rica-specific initial prompt
5. Metadata — YouTube Data API v3

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Limitations

• No speaker diarization — transcripts do not distinguish between President Chaves and journalists. Speaker attribution is planned for v2.
• Automatic transcription — not manually verified. Whisper large-v3 achieves high accuracy on formal speech but may hallucinate on silence, crosstalk, or background noise.
• Missing videos — A non significant amount of videos could not be downloaded due to broken YouTube uploads or osbcure naming from the channel.
• Scope — covers press interactions of varying length and formality. Not all videos are the formal weekly rueda de prensa.

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License

This dataset is released under CC BY 4.0. The source audio belongs to the Presidencia de la República de Costa Rica and was publicly broadcast.

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Citation

If you use this dataset, please cite:

@dataset{garcia2026papachaves,
  author    = {Garcia-Estrada, Ernesto and Godoy Echeverri, Julian},
  title     = {{PapaChaves}: A Longitudinal Corpus of Costa Rican Presidential Press Conferences},
  year      = {2026},
  publisher = {HuggingFace},
  url       = {https://huggingface.co/datasets/ergar/PapaChaves},
  note      = {Transcribed using WhisperX large-v3. Full presidential term of Rodrigo Chaves Robles (2022--2026).}
}

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Contact

Luis Ernesto Garcia — luis.ernesto.garcia@upc.edu