yuiseki/un-docs

UN Documents

The text of 39,363 United Nations General Assembly and Security Council documents, 1945 to 2023. Every PDF the UN publishes for these symbols is here: 37,499 carry a text layer, and the remaining 1,864 are scans, read with tesseract.

Code and provenance: https://github.com/yuiseki/undocs

What is in it

Documents	39,363
Characters	1,312,301,724
Median document	8,918 characters
Range	204 to 5,271,307 characters
Years	1945 to 2023
From the PDF text layer	37,499
Read with tesseract	1,864
Languages	en

Every decade is represented: about 950 documents from the 1940s, 2,400 from the 1960s, 4,900 from the 1990s, 9,500 from the 2010s. The weighting towards recent decades is the UN's own, not the collection's.

Columns

Column	Notes
id	the UN document symbol, e.g. S/RES/2728 (2024)
lang	ISO 639-1
body	extracted text
n_chars	length of body
text_source	pdf or ocr
pdf	path to the source PDF in the repository, where it is kept
date_distributed	date from the Distr. header, ISO 8601
date_adopted	date the body states the resolution was adopted
date_other	a date from the opening when neither of the above is found
date_*_rule	which pattern matched
date_*_raw	the text that was matched

Why three dates rather than one

They are different facts, and they disagree often enough that collapsing them would be a choice made on the reader's behalf. 7,517 documents carry both a distribution and an adoption date, and 4,575 of those, 61%, differ. The median gap is 39 days, which is the General Assembly's ordinary rhythm: resolutions are adopted in December and distributed in late January.

	documents
date_distributed	19,283
date_other	16,695
date_adopted	8,206
no date found	996

Every date is checked against the year the symbol implies, whether that year is written out, as in S/RES/2728 (2024), or carried by a General Assembly session number, where session N opens in September of 1945 + N. A date more than a year away from it comes from something the body cites rather than from the document, and is dropped.

The 1,864 that were read from images

These are scans with no text layer, mostly General Assembly supplements from around 1950: A/1251 is 76 pages, A/10034(SUPP) is 196. tesseract 5.5 read them at 300 dpi, 18,811 pages in all, adding 84,235,244 characters.

text_source says which is which. Filter on it if the distinction matters: what tesseract produces is a reading of an image, not something a publisher wrote down. It is good but not perfect. In a 200-file sample, 0.6% of characters fall outside the ordinary set of letters, digits and punctuation, and errors cluster in document symbols and small print: S/26347 is read as $/26347. Body text and place names come through.

What is not here

Only English. The other five official languages are collected by the same scraper and are not done.

The pdf column points into the repository, where most PDFs are not kept. 4,073 of them are, from an earlier collection; the rest were left out because English alone is 17 GB. scripts/docs.un.org/fetch.py and data/fetch-manifest.jsonl reproduce them.

Eight documents have a distribution date a year before their adoption date. S/RES/1231 (1999) reads as distributed 1998-03-11 and adopted 1999-03-11. Both are within a year of the symbol's own year, so the check cannot separate them; the document itself is probably what is wrong.

Licence

United Nations parliamentary documentation, and material published under a UN document symbol and not offered for sale, is excluded from United Nations copyright. See LICENSE and provenance.yaml.

The extracted text is a mechanical transcription adding no authorship. Any right arising from the assembly of this collection is waived.