--- license: cc0-1.0 task_categories: - translation size_categories: - 1M - **Original website:** https://panlex.org/ - **Paper:** Kamholz, David, Jonathan Pool, and Susan M. Colowick. 2014. [PanLex: Building a Resource for Panlingual Lexical Translation](http://www.lrec-conf.org/proceedings/lrec2014/pdf/1029_Paper.pdf). Proceedings of the 9th International Conference on Language Resources and Evaluation (LREC 2014). ## Uses The intended use of the dataset is to extract monolingual or bilingual dictionaries for the purposes of language learning by machines or humans. The code below illustrates how the dataset could be used to extract all French definitions of Finnish words found on Panlex. ```Python from datasets import load_dataset ds_fin_word = load_dataset('cointegrated/panlex-meanings', name='fin', split='train') ds_fra_def = load_dataset('cointegrated/panlex-definitions', name='fra', split='train') df_fin_word = ds_fin_word.to_pandas() df_fra_def = ds_fra_def.to_pandas() df_matched = df_fin_word.merge(df_fra_def, on='meaning', suffixes=['_wrd', '_def']).drop_duplicates(subset=['txt_wrd', 'txt_def']) print(df_matched.shape) # (11512, 13) print(df_matched.sample(5)[['txt_wrd', 'meaning', 'txt_def']]) # txt_wrd meaning txt_def # 101 kalsiumpitoisuus 30766618 teneur en calcium # 7003 keho 28131094 Partie matérielle de tout être animé. (2) # 8180 mikä tahansa 27960302 quel que soit celui qui # 4606 Safari 1689224 Safari (logiciel) # 9833 suositella 28251812 à trier ``` ## Dataset Structure The dataset is split by languages of the definition, denoted by their ISO 639 codes. Each language might contain multiple varieties; they are annotated within each per-language split. To determine a code for your language, please consult the https://panlex.org webside. For additional information about a language, you may also want to consult https://glottolog.org/. Each split contains the following fields: - `id` (int): id of the definition - `meaning` (int): id of the meaning, joinable with [cointegrated/panlex-meanings](https://huggingface.co/datasets/cointegrated/panlex-meanings) - `langvar` (int): id of the language variety of the definition - `txt` (str): text of the definition - `langvar_uid` (str): more human-readable id of the definition language (e.g. `eng-000` stands for generic English, `eng-001` for simple English, `eng-004` for American English). These ids could be looked up in the language dropdown at https://vocab.panlex.org/. - `example` (str, optional): example of a word corresponding to the meaning of the definition (preferably, but not always, in the language of the definition) - `example_langvar` (int, optional): id of the language variety of the example - `example_langvar_uid` (str, optional): human-readable id of the language variety of the example ## Dataset Creation This dataset has been extracted from https://panlex.org (the `20250201` database dump) and automatically rearranged on the per-language basis. The rearrangement consisted of the following steps: 1. Grouping together the language varieties from the `langvar` table with the same `lang_code`. 2. For each language, selecting the corresponding subset from the `definition` table. 3. Joining the selected set with the `denotation` table, to match an example of expression id with the given meaning, and then with the `expr` table, to get the text and language of the expression. ## Bias, Risks, and Limitations As with any multilingual dataset, Panlex data may exhbit the problem of under- and mis-representation of some languages. ## Citation Kamholz, David, Jonathan Pool, and Susan M. Colowick. 2014. [PanLex: Building a Resource for Panlingual Lexical Translation](http://www.lrec-conf.org/proceedings/lrec2014/pdf/1029_Paper.pdf). Proceedings of the 9th International Conference on Language Resources and Evaluation (LREC 2014). **BibTeX:** ```bib @inproceedings{kamholz-etal-2014-panlex, title = "{P}an{L}ex: Building a Resource for Panlingual Lexical Translation", author = "Kamholz, David and Pool, Jonathan and Colowick, Susan", editor = "Calzolari, Nicoletta and Choukri, Khalid and Declerck, Thierry and Loftsson, Hrafn and Maegaard, Bente and Mariani, Joseph and Moreno, Asuncion and Odijk, Jan and Piperidis, Stelios", booktitle = "Proceedings of the Ninth International Conference on Language Resources and Evaluation ({LREC}'14)", month = may, year = "2014", address = "Reykjavik, Iceland", publisher = "European Language Resources Association (ELRA)", url = "http://www.lrec-conf.org/proceedings/lrec2014/pdf/1029_Paper.pdf", pages = "3145--3150", abstract = "PanLex, a project of The Long Now Foundation, aims to enable the translation of lexemes among all human languages in the world. By focusing on lexemic translations, rather than grammatical or corpus data, it achieves broader lexical and language coverage than related projects. The PanLex database currently documents 20 million lexemes in about 9,000 language varieties, with 1.1 billion pairwise translations. The project primarily engages in content procurement, while encouraging outside use of its data for research and development. Its data acquisition strategy emphasizes broad, high-quality lexical and language coverage. The project plans to add data derived from 4,000 new sources to the database by the end of 2016. The dataset is publicly accessible via an HTTP API and monthly snapshots in CSV, JSON, and XML formats. Several online applications have been developed that query PanLex data. More broadly, the project aims to make a contribution to the preservation of global linguistic diversity.", } ``` ## Glossary To understand the terms like "language", "language variety", "expression" and "meaning" more precisely, please read the Panlex documentation on their [data model]( https://dev.panlex.org/data-model/) and [database design](https://dev.panlex.org/database-design/).