Sri Lanka Document Datasets: A Large-Scale, Multilingual Resource for Law, News, and Policy
This provides a foundational resource for researchers in computational linguistics, legal analytics, and socio-political studies focused on Sri Lanka, though it is incremental as it applies existing data collection methods to a new region.
The authors tackled the lack of open, large-scale multilingual document resources for Sri Lanka by creating a collection of 230,091 documents (57.7 GB) across 24 datasets in Sinhala, Tamil, and English, covering law, news, and policy domains, with daily updates and availability on platforms like GitHub and Hugging Face.
We present a collection of open, machine-readable document datasets covering parliamentary proceedings, legal judgments, government publications, news, and tourism statistics from Sri Lanka. The collection currently comprises of 230,091 documents (57.7 GB) across 24 datasets in Sinhala, Tamil, and English. The datasets are updated daily and mirrored on GitHub and Hugging Face. These resources aim to support research in computational linguistics, legal analytics, socio-political studies, and multilingual natural language processing. We describe the data sources, collection pipeline, formats, and potential use cases, while discussing licensing and ethical considerations. This manuscript is at version v2025-10-16-0818.