Please provide your name, affiliation if any, and intended use. Access is requested so the JoeyLLM team can understand who is using the dataset and how it is being used. Commercial use is allowed under the dataset licence. Please cite the dataset if it supports your research, project, publication, model, or public output.

🇨🇦 Canada Web Text — 5B-token Sample 🍁

A 5-billion-token sample of cleaned Canada-attributed web text derived from Common Crawl. This sample was produced as part of the JoeyLLM project's ongoing research into regional English language datasets. 🌐

This dataset is intended as a large-scale Canadian English web-text corpus for language-model pre-training, continued pre-training, data inspection, and regional English research.

📊 Dataset Summary 📌

Property	Value
Dataset name	Canada Web Text — 5B-token Sample
Project	JoeyLLM
Language	English
Region	Canada
Format	Parquet
Target token count	5,000,000,000
Source	Common Crawl-derived processed web text
Dataset type	Web text
Intended use	Text generation / language-model pre-training

🎯 Intended Uses

💡 Direct Use

Pre-training and continued pre-training of language models on Canada-domain text. 🤖
Domain-adaptation experiments involving Canadian English usage, place names, institutions, and topics. 📝
Research into Common Crawl-derived language-model datasets. 🔬
Inspection and reproducibility of JoeyLLM data pipeline outputs. ⚙️

🚫 Out-of-Scope Use

Extracting personal information or deanonymizing individuals. 🕵️‍♂️
Training models for malicious use, hate speech, harassment, or other harmful applications. 🛑
Treating this dataset as a balanced linguistic corpus or authoritative representation of Canadian English. ⚠️

🧱 Dataset Structure 🗂️

Each row represents one cleaned web document or document-like text segment.

Expected core columns include:

Field	Type	Description
`text`	string	Cleaned document body.
`token_count`	int	Token count used for sampling and filtering.
`url`	string	Original source URL, if available.
`id`	string	Stable document identifier, if available.
`dump`	string	Common Crawl dump identifier, if available.
`date`	string	Crawl date, if available.
`language`	string	Language label assigned upstream, expected to be `en`, if present.
`language_score`	float	Language-detector confidence score, if present.
`country`	string	Country attribution, expected to be `Canada`, if present.
`year`	string	Common Crawl dump year, e.g. `2024`, if present.
`source_file`	string	Source parquet shard used to construct the public sample, if present.
`hash`	string	Exact hash value, if exact hashing was enabled.
`simhash`	string	Near-duplicate hash value, if near-duplicate hashing was enabled.

🏗️ Dataset Creation

🔍 Curation Rationale

Regional linguistic nuances — including Canadian spelling, place names, institutions, public services, media references, and local web conventions — are often diluted in global web-scale datasets. JoeyLLM provides targeted regional English web-text samples to support research into foundation models with stronger regional coverage. 🏙️

🌍 Source

The dataset was derived from Common Crawl using a FineWeb-style web-text processing pipeline.

Documents were selected as Canada-attributed web text by the upstream country-attribution stage of the JoeyLLM pipeline. Country attribution may use signals such as top-level domains, URL/domain features, crawl metadata, and content-derived features.

This dataset should be interpreted as Canada-attributed web text, not necessarily text authored by Canadians or officially published in Canada.

🎲 Sampling Methodology

The sample was produced from the cleaned Canada-attributed corpus to create an approximately 5B-token release.

Rows were sampled from processed parquet data.
Token counts were taken from the precomputed token_count field where available.
Documents were appended in their entirety to avoid mid-text truncation.
Because documents are not truncated, the realised token count may slightly overshoot the 5B-token target.

🧹 Cleaning Pipeline

The dataset was processed using a FineWeb-style pipeline including:

Language filtering: documents retained only when classified as English with sufficient language confidence. ✨
Quality filtering: heuristics to reduce low-quality pages, boilerplate, repetitive text, navigation text, and obvious extraction artefacts. 🧽
Country attribution: targeted selection using signals such as .ca domains, URL features, crawl metadata, and Canada-specific content signals. 📍
Deduplication / hashing: duplicate tracking and filtering were applied upstream where available. ✂️

🛡️ Personal and Sensitive Information

This dataset is derived from public web crawls and may contain names, contact details, opinions, offensive content, copyrighted text, or other sensitive material. No dedicated PII masking was performed. ⚠️

Users should apply additional filtering, redaction, and safety review before using this dataset in production systems or public-facing models.

🚀 Loading the Dataset 💻

from datasets import load_dataset

# Load the full 5B-token sample
ds = load_dataset("JoeyLLM/Canada-dataset-5b", split="train")

print(ds)
print(ds[0]["text"][:500])

For streaming, which is recommended for rapid inspection:

from datasets import load_dataset

ds = load_dataset("JoeyLLM/Canada-dataset-5b", split="train", streaming=True)

for ex in ds.take(3):
    print(ex.get("url"), ex["token_count"])

⚠️ Limitations and Known Issues

This dataset is derived from public web crawl data and inherits the usual limitations of Common Crawl-derived corpora.

Known limitations include:

Heuristic country attribution. Canada attribution is based on automated signals and may contain false positives or non-Canadian content.
Web-text noise. Boilerplate, navigation text, advertisements, duplicate fragments, low-quality pages, and formatting artefacts may remain.
Residual duplication. Deduplication and hashing reduce duplicate content, but near-duplicates may remain.
Potential personal information. Public web data may contain personal names, contact details, or other sensitive material.
Copyright and source terms. The underlying text originates from public web pages and may remain subject to the rights and terms of the original publishers.
Not balanced by domain or genre. The dataset reflects the distribution of selected web crawl data rather than a deliberately balanced linguistic corpus.

📜 License ⚖️

The dataset card, metadata, selection, and processing outputs are released under CC BY 4.0.

Commercial use is allowed under the dataset licence, subject to attribution and the other terms of CC BY 4.0. The underlying text is derived from publicly crawled web pages via Common Crawl and may remain subject to the rights, licences, and terms of the original publishers. Users are responsible for ensuring that their downstream use complies with applicable law and source terms.

📚 Citation ✒️

A citation entry for the JoeyLLM project paper will be added once available. Until then, please cite this dataset card by URL:

@misc{joeyllm_canada_5b,
  title        = {Canada Web Text -- 5B-token Sample},
  author       = {JoeyLLM Team},
  year         = {2026},
  howpublished = {https://huggingface.co/datasets/JoeyLLM/Canada-dataset-5b}
}

🙏 Acknowledgements 🤝

Built using Common Crawl data and a FineWeb-style processing pipeline. While dataset selection, cleaning, sampling, and publication were carried out by the JoeyLLM team, this project would not have been possible without the invaluable tools, feedback, and ongoing support of the broader open-source AI community. We extend our deepest gratitude to all open-source contributors and researchers whose collaborative efforts continue to drive this field forward. 🌟

📬 Dataset Card Contact ✉️

For inquiries regarding research access, collaboration, or dataset questions, please contact:

Matthew Altenburg AI Scientist & Lead Researcher, JoeyLLM matthew.altenburg@anu.edu.au Backup: mattaltenburg@gmail.com


Check the actual repo name before saving. If it is not `JoeyLLM/Canada-dataset-5b`, update the two `load_dataset(...)` lines and the citation URL.

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