UppsalaNLP/swedish-novels-1800-1940

Swedish Novels 1800-1940

A corpus of Swedish literary novels and short story collections from 1800-1940, sourced from Litteraturbanken.

Dataset Description

This dataset contains over 1.1 million sentences from 350 Swedish literary works spanning 140 years of Swedish literature. The texts have been sentence-segmented and include metadata about authors, titles, and publication years.

Fields

• —text: The sentence text
• —author: Author name
• —title: Work title
• —year: Publication year (1800-1940)
• —paragraph_id: Paragraph number within the work
• —document_id: Source document identifier

Statistics

Notable Authors

The corpus includes works by major Swedish authors such as:

• —Selma Lagerlöf (Nobel Prize 1909)
• —August Strindberg
• —Hjalmar Bergman
• —Verner von Heidenstam (Nobel Prize 1916)
• —Karin Boye
• —C.J.L. Almqvist

Usage

from datasets import load_dataset

dataset = load_dataset("UppsalaNLP/swedish-novels-1800-1940")

# Access splits
train = dataset["train"]
test = dataset["test"]

# Filter by author
lagerlof = train.filter(lambda x: "Lagerlöf" in x["author"])

# Filter by time period
early_1900s = train.filter(lambda x: 1900 <= x["year"] <= 1920)

Source

Data sourced from Litteraturbanken. Works were selected based on:

• —Published 1800-1940
• —Written in Swedish (no translations)
• —Not Finland-Swedish authors
• —Available in proofread OCR
• —Open license (CC-BY or CC0)

Citation

@inproceedings{stymne-etal-2023-parser,
    title = "Parser Evaluation for Analyzing Swedish 19th-20th Century Literature",
    author = "Stymne, Sara and {\"O}stman, Carin and H{\aa}kansson, David",
    booktitle = "Proceedings of the 24th Nordic Conference on Computational Linguistics (NoDaLiDa)",
    month = may,
    year = "2023",
    address = "T{\'o}rshavn, Faroe Islands",
    pages = "335--346"
}

Acknowledgements

Funded by Swedish Research Council project 2020-02617: Fictional prose and language change.

License

CC-BY-4.0

Links

• —Uppsala NLP
• —GitHub Repository
• —Litteraturbanken