The N-grams of the Newspaper and Periodical Corpus of the National Library of Finland

Currently available versions of this resource

Resource information

The National Library of Finland has digitized a large proportion of Finland’s Finnish and Swedish newspapers, magazines, and periodicals published between 1820 and 2000 (Finnish) and between 1770 and 1940 (Swedish). This resource contains sets of unigrams, bigrams and trigrams extracted from a corpus that has been compiled from the digitized newspapers by the University of Helsinki.

The resource consists of plain UTF-8 encoded text files, each containing a list of n-grams that have been ordered by their frequencies from highest to lowest. Each line in a file consists of two or more fields separated by a whitespace character. The first field indicates the absolute frequency of a unique n-gram, and the remaining fields contain the tokens (strings of non-whitespace characters) of the n-gram itself. Uppercase letters have been retained as such and have not been converted into lowercase letters. Punctuation characters are treated as separate tokens except when they are part of an abbreviation (”etc.”, ”mm.”) or when they separate a case ending or an enclitic from an abbreviation or a sign (”EU:ssa”, ”%:iin”), as per the typographic principles of standard Finnish. The n-grams have been computed across sentence boundaries for each decade (from the 1770s to the 1940s and from the 1820s to the 2000s respectively) as well as for the entire corpus, with unigrams, bigrams and trigrams in separate files.

Important notes

Since the source material has been digitized by the means of optical character recognition (OCR), the resource also contains erroneous word forms and non-word strings of characters. Furthermore, due to the large time span of the original corpus, the resource contains several lexical items and spelling variants that have since become obsolete in standard Finnish and standard Swedish.

The resource will be updated in the future as improvements are being made to the source material.

The data is derived from The Newspaper and Periodical Corpus of the National Library of Finland

License and access

• Some versions of this resource are available publicly (PUB), whereas others might require you to log in as an academic user (ACA) or to apply for individual access rights (RES).
• Click on the license image to see the resource-specific license text.
• Some/all versions of this resource may contain personal data (license condition +PRIV). The license may then include additional data protection terms and conditions that you must follow. If processing personal data, maintain a public Privacy Notice regarding your project and provide the link to the Language Bank of Finland, see instructions.
• Of this language corpus different versions/subcorpora are published in the Language Bank of Finland. The versions are available through the Language Bank Download Service and/or through the Korp concordance tool. The links to the different versions can be found from the list above.
• Some versions of this resource are available in the computing environment (see column ’Location’). icon-question-circle

Detailed information on the content of each version, user rights and licenses can be found from it’s specific metadata record.

This resource group page has a Persistent Identifier: http://urn.fi/urn:nbn:fi:lb-2021091407

Last modified on 2025-01-31