RFE/RL Crimean Tatar News Text Corpus

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License:

CC-BY-NC-SA-4.0

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Steward:

RFE/RL

Task: NLP

Release Date: 4/14/2026

Format: TXT

Size: 18.35 MB

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Description

This dataset serves as a comprehensive longitudinal news corpus for the Crimean Tatar language, sourced from Qırım.Aqiqat (ktat.krymr.com), the Crimean Tatar-language broadcaster of Radio Free Europe/Radio Liberty's Crimea.Realities project. Spanning from March 2014 to March 2026, the corpus contains 32,684 unique articles, totaling over 7.5 million tokens. The dataset captures the historical record and linguistic evolution of the region over a 12-year period. Note that due to language detection limitations, articles were initially scattered across related language tags (like Turkish and Tatar) but have been aggregated into a unified file. The dataset is formatted as plain text with YAML front-matter metadata, making it ready for linguistic analysis, search indexing, and cultural preservation research.

Specifics

Licensing

Creative Commons Attribution Non Commercial Share Alike 4.0 International (CC-BY-NC-SA-4.0)

https://spdx.org/licenses/CC-BY-NC-SA-4.0.html

Considerations

Restrictions/Special Constraints

When using RFE/RL text content in full, we require that you credit RFE/RL by including: • A permanent link, placed before the text of the article, to the original article on www.rferl.org or ktat.krymr.com • The following text in the article: Copyright (c) 2026 RFE/RL, Inc. Used with the permission of Radio Free Europe/Radio Liberty You must also refrain from altering or distorting the meaning, name, or integrity of the product. When using excerpts of RFE/RL text content, we require that you note that the material is an excerpt and link to the original content somewhere in your text. When translating RFE/RL text content into another language, we require that you note that the material is a translation, state the original language of the text, and provide a link to the original content somewhere in your text. The translated text must not alter or distort the meaning, name, or integrity of the content.

Forbidden Usage

• The sale of RFE/RL content is prohibited. • The use of RFE/RL content in advertisements or endorsements is prohibited. • The use of RFE/RL content to train artificial intelligence (AI) systems is prohibited.

Metadata

RFE/RL Crimean Tatar News Text Corpus (2014–2026)

Overview

This corpus was extracted from the archives of Qırım.Aqiqat (ktat.krymr.com), the Crimean Tatar-language broadcaster of Radio Free Europe/Radio Liberty's Crimea.Realities project.

Statistics

  • Total Articles: 32684

  • Time Period: 2014-03 to 2026-03

  • Languages:

    • Crimean Tatar (crh): 32684 articles (~7591019 tokens)

Note on Processing:

  • Language Detection: The language of each article was identified using the pycld2 Python package. Because pycld2 lacks native support for Crimean Tatar, these articles were initially scattered across Turkish (tr), Tatar (tt), Azerbaijani (az), Turkmen (tk), and Unknown (unk). These have been aggregated into the crh file for this dataset. The internal YAML front matter will still display the original CLD2 tag.

  • Paragraph Structure: Paragraph breaks from the original HTML were preserved to the extent possible.

  • Formatting: Text has been wrapped at 80 characters for easier inspection in terminal environments. This wrapping is done strictly on whitespace; no words were split or chunked apart.

Data Format

The dataset is provided as a text file:

  • krymr.crh.txt

Inside the file, each article is delimited by a YAML Front Matter block containing metadata, followed by the full article text.

Metadata Fields

  • url: The canonical URL of the original article.

  • title: The headline of the article.

  • date: Publication date (ISO 8601 format: YYYY-MM-DD).

  • script: The writing system used (latn or cyrl).

  • lang: The detected language code (often a misclassification for Crimean Tatar).

Source & License

All content is the property of RFE/RL, Inc. and is protected by U.S. and international copyright laws.

Users of this dataset must adhere to the RFE/RL Terms of Use. Specifically, users must credit RFE/RL in any reuse:

Copyright (c) 2026 RFE/RL, Inc. Used with the permission of Radio Free Europe/Radio Liberty.