GPT-NL Public Corpus: A Permissively Licensed, Dutch-First Dataset for LLM Pre-training

TL;DR

The GPT-NL Public Corpus is the largest permissively licensed Dutch language dataset, including 36B Dutch tokens and extensive multilingual data, designed to support lawful and useful language model development.

Contribution

It introduces the largest Dutch-specific corpus with curated multilingual data, enabling lawful and effective pre-training of language models.

Findings

Contains 36B Dutch tokens not in other LLM corpora

Includes curated multilingual data from various sources

All data is permissively licensed and publicly available

Abstract

We present the GPT-NL Public Corpus, the biggest permissively licensed corpus of Dutch language resources. The GPT-NL Public Corpus contains 21 Dutch-only collections totalling 36B preprocessed Dutch tokens not present in any other LLM pretraining corpus. Additionally, the corpus includes roughly 207B English, 232B Code, and 48B German/Danish tokens taken from existing sets which we further curated for compliance. This corpus includes curated data from large existing corpora like Common Corpus and Common Crawl, as well as newly created Dutch-specific collections. Most newly created Dutch collections consist of content collected in collaboration with organisations or synthetically augmented content. All data is collected and evaluated with the aim of facilitating the creation of (commercial) language models that are lawful, useful and non-harmful. All data included in the GPT-NL Public Corpus is sourced from datasets with permissive licensing and is curated and redistributed under a CC-BY license. The full dataset is publicly available on the Hugging Face Hub.