Data Card — verba: Ukrainian Proverbs Corpus

Version: 1.0.2 · Released: 2026-06-24 · Author: Dmytro Yemelianov (ORCID) Home: https://verbacorpus.org · Repo: https://github.com/dmytro-yemelianov/verbacorpus

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Motivation

Ukrainian paremiology lacked a single unified, machine-readable corpus that (a) attributed every proverb to its documented historical source, (b) preserved original orthography alongside a modern-spelling rendering, and (c) carried thematic labels usable for search and NLP. Existing digitizations were isolated (PDFs, scanned books, siloed databases) and none covered the full span from 1841 to the present.

verba was created to fill that gap: a canonical, deduplicated, source-attributed corpus drawn from five major published collections spanning 185 years of Ukrainian paremiology. It is built and maintained by Dmytro Yemelianov as an open scholarly resource. The dataset is enriched with modern-spelling renderings and a 27-theme taxonomy generated by batched Claude Code agents, then quality-audited. It powers a searchable PWA and multi-format REST API at https://verbacorpus.org.

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Composition

48,787 instances — one row per proverb or adage. Language: uk (Ukrainian).

Schema (10 columns, corpus.csv)

Column	Meaning
id	Stable identifier (pNNNNNN)
text	Verbatim proverb in its source orthography (never modified)
normalized_text	Lowercased, punctuation-stripped match key
modern_text	Modern standard Ukrainian spelling (LLM-generated)
keyword	Lemma/term (Franko), if any
explanation	Scholarly note (Franko-preferred), cleaned
category	1–3 theme keys from the 27-theme taxonomy, ;-joined, primary first
sources	;-joined source citation keys
source_refs	;-joined per-source references
variant_group	Id linking probable dialectal variants

Per-source counts

Source	Entries	Notes
Franko 1901 — Іван Франко, Галицько-руські народні приповідки	30,906	Primary source; carries scholarly explanations
Номис 1864 — Матвій Номис, Українські приказки, прислів'я і таке інше	9,785	1864 orthography preserved; best-effort OCR (~75–80%)
Бобкова — В.І. Бобкова та ін. (упоряд.), Українські народні прислів'я та приказки	5,613	Modern Ukrainian; tesseract-OCR'd from PDF
Ількевич 1841 — Григорій Ількевич, Галицкіи приповѣдки и загадки	2,702	Oldest collection (1841)
Млодзинський 2009 — Практичний російсько-український словник приказок	2,261	Modern bilingual collection

Additional statistics

• With explanation: 30,532 (62.6%) — drawn primarily from Franko 1901 critical apparatus
• With modern_text: 48,787 (100%) — all entries carry a modern-spelling rendering
• Categorized: 48,787 (100%) — all entries carry 1–3 thematic categories from the 27-theme taxonomy
• Variant groups: 5,064 (2,638 contain Nomis variants linked to other sources)
• No train/test splits — this is a reference corpus, not a benchmark dataset
• modern_text, category, cleaned explanation, and tuned variant_group are LLM-generated data artifacts (not deterministically reproducible; see enrich/REPORT.md)

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Collection Process

The corpus unifies five digitized collections via distinct ingestion pipelines:

Historical OCR sources (Nomis 1864, Bobkova):

• pdftoppm -r 300 → tesseract 5.5.2 (tessdata_best ukr model, --psm 6 --oem 1) over page images
• For Nomis 1864: per-column crop (expand/nomis_ocr.py) because the 1864 edition is two-column; batched sonnet LLM extraction of proverb text + modern_text from the critical apparatus
• For Bobkova: rule-based segmentation, de-hyphenation, hunspell-flagged residuals cleaned by haiku agents; 36 unrecoverable rows dropped

Other sources (Franko 1901, Ilkevich 1841, Mlodzynskyi 2009) were ingested from existing digital transcriptions.

Deduplication and merging: exact-match on normalized_text + rapidfuzz token_set_ratio ≥ 85 fuzzy variant linking. Nomis 1864 merge: 1,442 proverbs exact-merged into existing entries (adding Nomis1864 as a second attestation), 2,232 cross-source variant-linked, 5,914 genuinely distinct.

See expand/REPORT.md for per-source ingestion details and enrich/REPORT.md for enrichment pipeline details.

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Preprocessing / Cleaning / Labeling

All preprocessing is non-destructive — the original text field is never modified.

normalized_text — deterministic: lowercase + punctuation-stripping, used as deduplication/merge key only.

modern_text (LLM artifact) — generated by batched Claude sonnet agents (Pass B) converting source orthography to modern standard Ukrainian spelling. For Bobkova (modern source) and Mlodzynskyi 2009, modern_text equals cleaned text. Quality: ~95% acceptable (quality audit n=40; see enrich/REPORT.md).

category (LLM artifact) — 1–3 theme keys from the fixed 27-theme taxonomy, generated by batched Claude haiku agents (Pass A). ~85% acceptable; ~15% are debatable or wrong, clustering where the proverb's theme falls outside the 27-key vocabulary or where secondary tags are over-eager. The primary tag is the most reliable. Out-of-taxonomy keys from agents were dropped deterministically at merge time.

explanation (LLM-cleaned) — scholarly notes drawn from Franko 1901 critical apparatus, cleaned by haiku agents. Present for 30,532 entries.

variant_group (computed) — rapidfuzz token_set_ratio ≥ 85 grouping, capped: groups larger than 8 members dissolved to prevent over-linking. Final: 5,064 groups. Groups are link-only and non-destructive (records are never merged or modified).

The 27-theme taxonomy is fixed and defined in enrich/taxonomy.csv: work_labor, poverty_wealth, food_hunger, drink_alcohol, family_kinship, marriage_gender, speech_lying, wisdom_folly, fate_luck, time_seasons, death_illness, religion_god, social_relations, class_power, justice_truth, animals, body_health, home_household, conflict_enmity, friendship_love, travel_distance, trade_money, ethnic_local, emotion_mood, nature_weather, appearance_reputation, idiom_expressive.

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Uses

Suitable uses:

• NLP research: text normalization, historical spelling variation, paremiology, language modeling
• Linguistics and cultural studies: diachronic analysis of Ukrainian folk wisdom (1841–present)
• Education: searchable reference for Ukrainian proverbs with explanations and thematic access
• Cultural preservation: unified, attributed digital record of five major published collections
• Search and retrieval: the live API at https://verbacorpus.org supports lexical and semantic search

Cautions and limitations:

• OCR noise persists in text for Nomis 1864 (best-effort 75–80% character fidelity) and residual artifacts in Bobkova (2–3%)
• modern_text, category, and cleaned explanation are LLM-generated and orientational, not gold-standard labels — do not use as ground truth for model training without independent verification
• The primary category tag is more reliable than secondary tags; ~15% of any tag may be debatable
• Variant groups are link-only and heuristic; they should not be treated as definitive orthographic equivalence

Out-of-scope:

• The corpus is not a benchmark dataset and has no train/test splits
• Bobkova and Mlodzynskyi 2009 texts remain under their publishers' rights; included for research/education per sources attribution; removed on request

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Distribution

• GitHub Releases: CSV, JSON, JSONL, XML assets at https://github.com/dmytro-yemelianov/verbacorpus/releases/tag/v1.0.0 (see scripts/release.sh for the build)
• REST API: multi-format (json, jsonl, xml, csv, tsv) at https://verbacorpus.org/api/v1 — search, filter, export, semantic search; OpenAPI 3 spec at /api/v1/openapi.json
• Croissant metadata: croissant.json at repo root (MLCommons schema.org JSON-LD)

Licensing (layered):

Layer	Content	License
Compilation + enrichment	modern_text, category, cleaned explanation, variant_group, the unified corpus structure	CC BY 4.0
Historical texts	Franko 1901, Nomis 1864, Ilkevich 1841	Public domain
Modern collections	Bobkova, Mlodzynskyi 2009	Texts remain under publishers' rights; included for research/education, attributed per sources, removed on request

Cite as: Yemelianov, Dmytro (2026). verba — Ukrainian Proverbs Corpus (v1.0.2). https://verbacorpus.org

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Maintenance

Maintainer: Dmytro Yemelianov (ORCID 0009-0002-9244-7426)

Versioning policy (semantic versioning for datasets):

• MAJOR — schema changes or breaking restructuring
• MINOR — new source added or significant corpus additions
• PATCH — corrections to existing entries, OCR fixes, category corrections

Reporting issues: GitHub Issues at https://github.com/dmytro-yemelianov/verbacorpus/issues. Include the entry id and the nature of the error (OCR, category, modern_text, variant group).

Update cadence: as new historical sources are digitized and ingested or as corrections accumulate. The tesseract + LLM pipeline (expand/) is reusable for additional archive.org sources.

Reproducibility note: modern_text, category, and variant_group are committed LLM artifacts. Regenerating them requires Claude Code; the outputs are not byte-reproducible but quality is audited (see enrich/REPORT.md).

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Known Limitations

• Nomis 1864 OCR (~75–80% character fidelity): two-column 1864 scan; per-column crop + tesseract errors persist in text; rare LLM normalization toward familiar forms (~1–2%). Identifiable via Nomis1864 in sources. See expand/REPORT.md.
• Category accuracy (~85% acceptable): ~15% of tags are debatable or wrong; misses cluster where the theme falls outside the 27-key vocabulary or where secondary tags are over-eager. Primary tag is the most reliable. See enrich/REPORT.md.
• modern_text accuracy (~95% acceptable): two wrong cases in quality audit (n=40): an un-modernized archaic future construction and a dropped prefix; minor cases retain dialectal reflexive ся intentionally.
• Variant groups are link-only and heuristic: groups larger than 8 were dissolved; threshold (85) and cap are tunable. Not a definitive orthographic equivalence claim.
• Bobkova residual OCR (~2–3%): front-matter fragments and cross-page hyphen breaks that per-page segmentation cannot rejoin.
• Enrichment is not deterministically reproducible: regenerating requires Claude Code agents; committed artifacts are the authoritative version.

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Sources

The corpus unifies text from five published collections. Full bibliographic data is in references.bib and references.csl.json.

1. Іван Франко (зібрав, упоряд. і пояснив). Галицько-руські народні приповідки. Етнографічний збірник, тт. X, XVI, XXIII, XXVII, XXVIII (у 3 т., 6 вип., 1901–1910). Львів: Накладом Наукового товариства імені Шевченка, 1901. https://www.i-franko.name/uk/Folklore/1901/GalRusProverbs.html
2. Матвій Номис (упоряд.). Українські приказки, прислів'я і таке інше. Санкт-Петербург: Друкарня Тиблена і Ко (К. Куліша), 1864. https://archive.org/details/nomis1864
3. Бобкова В., Лавров Ф., Ліздвой М., Сухобрус Г., Ткаченко Ф. (упоряд.). Українські народні прислів'я та приказки. Вид. 2-ге, випр. і доп. Київ: Видавництво АН УРСР, 1961.
4. Григорій Ількевич (зібрав). Галицькі приповідки і загадки. Відень: Друкарня оо. Мехитаристів, 1841. http://irbis-nbuv.gov.ua/dlib/item/0000436
5. Млодзинський Г. (упоряд.). Практичний російсько-український словник приказок. Репринт вид. 1929 р. Київ: Інститут енциклопедичних досліджень НАН України, 2009. ISBN 978-966-02-5147-2. https://repository.encyclopedia.kyiv.ua/items/show/48

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Citation

Yemelianov, Dmytro (2026). verba — Ukrainian Proverbs Corpus (v1.0.2). https://verbacorpus.org

Machine-readable: CITATION.cff (Citation File Format 1.2.0).