Dataset Card for World Bank Project Documents

Dataset Summary

This is a dataset of documents related to World Bank development projects in the period 1947-2020. The dataset includes the documents used to propose or describe projects when they are launched, and those in the review. The documents are indexed by the World Bank project ID, which can be used to obtain features from multiple publicly available tabular datasets.

Supported Tasks and Leaderboards

No leaderboard yet. A wide range of possible supported tasks, including varieties of summarization, QA, and language modelling. To date, the datasets have been used primarily in conjunction with tabular data (via BERT embeddings) to predict project outcomes.

Languages

English

Dataset Structure

Data Instances

Data Fields

• World Bank project ID
• Document text
• Document type: "APPROVAL" for documents written at the beginning of a project, when it is approved; and "REVIEW" for documents written at the end of a project

Data Splits

To allow for open exploration, and since different applications will want to do splits based on different sampling weights, we have not done a train test split but left all files in the train branch.

Dataset Creation

Source Data

Documents were scraped from the World Bank's public project archive, following links through to specific project pages and then collecting the text files made available by the World Bank.

Annotations

This dataset is not annotated.

Personal and Sensitive Information

None.

Considerations for Using the Data

Social Impact of Dataset

Affects development projects, which can have large-scale consequences for many millions of people.

Discussion of Biases

The documents reflect the history of development, which has well-documented and well-studied issues with the imposition of developed world ideas on developing world countries. The documents provide a way to study those in the field of development, but should not be used for their description of the recipient countries, since that language will reflect a multitude of biases, especially in the earlier reaches of the historical projects.

Additional Information

Dataset Curators

Luke Jordan, Busani Ndlovu.

Licensing Information

MIT.

Citation Information

@dataset{world-bank-project-documents, author = {Jordan, Luke and Ndlovu, Busani and Shenk, Justin}, title = {World Bank Project Documents Dataset}, year = {2021} }

Contributions

Thanks to @luke-grassroot, @FRTNX and @justinshenk for adding this dataset.