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

Metric	Value
Total sentences	1,181,554
Authors	87
Works	350
Year range	1800-1940
Train split	1,063,398
Test split	118,156

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