CUI03/german-commons

German Commons - 154 Billion Tokens of Openly Licensed Text for German Language Models

A comprehensive collection of German-language text data under open licenses for training German language models.

• Datasheet: DATASHEET.md.
• Paper: arxiv.org/abs/2510.13996
• Code: github.com/coral-nlp/llmdata
• Bloom Filter (DOLMA-compatible): bloom_filter.bin

Dataset Description

This dataset is aggregated from 41 diverse sources and contains 154.56 billion tokens of German text data with 35.78 million documents spanning 7 thematic domains:

• 🌐 Web Commons: 19.89B tokens source from Wiki projects, online discussions, code repositories, social media posts, YouTube transcripts
• 💬 Political Commons: 3.57B tokens sourced from parliamentary documents, speeches, protocols, political vocabulary
• ⚖️ Legal Commons: 2.99B tokens sourced from court decisions, federal law, legal databases, EU legal documents
• 📰 News Commons: 72.67B tokens sourced from historical and current newspapers archives
• 🏦 Economics Commons: 0.11B tokens sourced from EU public tenders
• 📚 Cultural Commons: 54.49B tokens sourced from cultural heritage collections
• 🔬 Scientific Commons: 0.84B tokens sourced from scholarly papers, books, and technical journals

Dataset Features

Each record contains the following fields:

• id: Unique identifier string, as per each documents' source dataset
• source: Source dataset name
• subset: Thematic subset (Cultural, Legal, Political, Scientific, News, Web, Economic)
• text: Main text content; deduplicated, quality filtered, with consistent formatting and encoding. Can be split at newlines to obtain paragraph text.
• license: List of applicable licenses for each document, given as canonical SPDX license URL.
• num_tokens: GPT-2 token count
• perplexity: Text perplexity measured with a KenLM model trained on German Wikipedia text
• ocr_score: OCR quality score measured using OCRoscope

Dataset Usage

• Load the entire dataset

  from datasets import load_dataset
  
  ds = load_dataset("coral-nlp/german-commons")
  

• Load a thematic subset

  ds = load_dataset("coral-nlp/german-commons", "cultural")
  

• Load individual source datasets

  wikipedia = load_dataset("coral-nlp/german-commons", "web", split="wikipedia")
  

Supported splits and constituent datasets are:

Subset	Split Key	Dataset Name	Docs	Tokens	License	Text Type	Source
web	wikipedia	Wikipedia	2,930,224	2,948,751,608	CC-BY-SA-4.0	Various	🔗
web	wikidiscussions	Wikipedia Discussions	8,349,076	1,218,210,917	CC-BY-SA-4.0	Online Discussions	🔗
web	youtubecommons	YouTube Commons	2,809,714	14,478,850,964	Various	Video Subtitles	🔗
web	onemillionposts	One Million Posts Corpus	946,082	94,872,633	CC-BY-4.0	Online Discussions	🔗
web	thestack	The Stack (Markdown and TXT Subsets)	421,466	1,105,173,228	Various	Various	🔗
political	reichtagsprotokolle	Reichtagsprotokolle	522	703,495,637	CC-BY-SA-4.0	Parliamentary Protocols	🔗
political	germanpoliticalspeeches	German Political Speeches	6,678	29,409,655	CC-BY-4.0	Speech Transcripts	🔗
political	btdrucksachen	Corpus der Drucksachen des Deutschen Bundestages	3,017	528,769,669	CC0-1.0	Parliamentary Publications	🔗
political	btplenarprotokolle	Corpus der Plenarprotokolle des Deutschen Bundestages	1,833	316,034,708	CC0-1.0	Parliamentary Protocols	🔗
political	eurovoc	EuroVoc	245,838	1,988,111,462	EUPL	Parliamentary Publications	🔗
legal	bundesrecht	Corpus des Deutschen Bundesrechts	3,217	1,004,294	CC0-1.0	German Federal Laws	🔗
legal	openlegaldata	OpenLegalData	249,909	1,915,956,613	CC0-1.0	Court Decisions	🔗
legal	bfh	Corpus der Entscheidungen des BFH	10,885	67,791,931	CC0-1.0	Court Decisions	🔗
legal	bgh20	Entscheidungen des BGH in Strafsachen des 20. Jhd.	36,062	92,873,390	CC0-1.0	Court Decisions	🔗
legal	bgh	Corpus der Entscheidungen des BGH	77,258	292,832,709	CC0-1.0	Court Decisions	🔗
legal	bverfg	Corpus der Entscheidungen des BVerfG	8,028	39,503,223	CC0-1.0	Court Decisions	🔗
legal	bpatg	Corpus der Entscheidungen des BpatG	30,705	185,099,188	CC0-1.0	Court Decisions	🔗
legal	bverwg	Corpus der Entscheidungen des BVerwG	27,185	123,487,739	CC0-1.0	Court Decisions	🔗
legal	bverfgaes	Corpus der amtl. Entscheidungssammlung des BVerfG	919	24,427,294	CC0-1.0	Court Decisions	🔗
legal	bag	Corpus der Entscheidungen des BAG	5,624	48,248,111	CC0-1.0	Court Decisions	🔗
legal	eurlex	EurLEX	64,934	201,263,562	CC-BY-4.0	European Union Laws	🔗
news	zeitungsportal	Deutsches Zeitungsportal	8,076,164	43,871,094,547	CC0-1.0	News Articles	🔗
news	europeana	Europeana Newspapers	3,256,341	20,684,418,365	CC0-1.0	News Articles	🔗
news	anno	ANNO	1,910,281	8,103,825,248	CC0-1.0	News Articles	🔗
news	wikinews	WikiNews	23,266	14,222,520	CC-BY-4.0	News Articles	🔗
economic	tedeutenders	TEDEUTenders	57,214	110,611,112	CC0-1.0	Procurement Notices	🔗
cultural	dibilit	DiBiLit-Korpus	2,062	216,391,448	CC-BY-SA-4.0	Literature	🔗
cultural	dibiphil	DiBiPhil-Korpus	269	32,151,997	CC-BY-SA-4.0	Literature	🔗
cultural	wikisource	Wikisource	240,689	347,770,430	CC-BY-SA-4.0	Various	🔗
cultural	wikivoyage	Wikivoyage	20,370	42,025,478	CC-BY-SA-4.0	Travel	🔗
cultural	germanpd	German-PD	123,592	49,333,198,231	CC0-1.0	Literature	🔗
cultural	blbooks	BLBooks	3,714	1,012,047,216	CC0-1.0	Literature	🔗
cultural	mosel	MOSEL	3,127,203	3,181,917,752	CC-BY-4.0	Speech Transcripts	🔗
cultural	sbbfulltexts	SBB Fulltexts	2,605,569	358,514,283	CC-BY-4.0	Literature	🔗
cultural	wikiquote	Wikiquote	8,612	6,688,458	CC-BY-4.0	Quotes & Proverbs	🔗
scientific	wikibooks	Wikibooks	346	180,257,799	CC-BY-SA-4.0	Educational Books	🔗
scientific	polyjournal	Digitalisierung des Polytechnischen Journals	27,292	50,434,996	CC-BY-SA-4.0	Scholarly Papers	🔗
scientific	doab	Directory of Open Access Books	1,939	166,920,321	Various	Scholarly Books	🔗
scientific	arxiv	arXiv	8	103,478	Various	Scholarly Papers	🔗
scientific	openalex	OpenAlex	47,733	413,632,648	Various	Educational Content	🔗
scientific	wikiversity	Wikiversity	16,371	27,802,099	CC-BY-SA-4.0	Scholarly Papers	🔗

Citation

If you use this dataset, please cite the correponding paper:

@article{gienapp:2025d,
    title        = {{The German Commons -- 154 Billion Tokens of Openly Licensed Text for German Language Models}},
    author       = {Lukas Gienapp and
                    Christopher Schr\"oder and
                    Stefan Schweter and
                    Christopher Akiki and
                    Ferdinand Schlatt and
                    Arden Zimmermann and
                    Phillipe Gen\^et and
                    Martin Potthast},
    year         = 2025,
    month        = oct,
    journal      = {CoRR},
    volume       = {abs/2510.13996},
    url          = {https://arxiv.org/abs/2510.13996}
}

License

This dataset aggregation and metadata is released under ODC-BY license. Individual documents have their own specific licenses - please check the license field for each record.