---
pretty_name: 'YouTube Video Transcripts Dataset: Creative Commons, Multilingual (CSV Sample)'
license: cc-by-nc-4.0
language:
- en
- es
- fr
- de
- pt
- it
- nl
- ru
- hi
- multilingual
multilinguality:
- multilingual
size_categories:
- 10K<n<100K
task_categories:
- text-classification
- text-generation
- translation
- summarization
task_ids:
- topic-classification
- language-modeling
annotations_creators:
- machine-generated
language_creators:
- found
source_datasets:
- extended|PleIAs/YouTube-Commons
tags:
- youtube
- youtube-transcripts
- transcripts
- captions
- subtitles
- video
- speech
- multilingual
- creative-commons
- cc-by
- nlp
- csv
- matrixnorm
configs:
- config_name: videos
  data_files: csv/videos.csv
  default: true
- config_name: channels
  data_files: csv/channels.csv
- config_name: transcripts
  data_files: csv/transcripts.csv
---
# YouTube Video Transcripts Dataset: Creative Commons, Multilingual (CSV Sample)

*Release name: YouTube-Commons Normalized v1: free CSV sample*

A free, CSV-only sample of a normalized, de-duplicated and labeled build of
YouTube-Commons: speech transcripts of YouTube videos that their creators
published under the CC BY license.

The sample covers **5,953 channels (about 1% of all channels, at most 25
videos each), 18,081 videos and 21,010 transcripts**. For each sample video it
includes the primary transcript (English when available) and the original-language
transcript when that differs.

## Full and trainable versions

| Package | Contents | Format |
|---|---|---|
| Free sample (this repo) | ~1% of channels | CSV |
| Trainable | 3,112,197 videos with a non-empty transcript, one primary transcript each, train/validation/test 98/1/1 | Parquet |
| Full | 3,156,666 videos, 585,789 channels, 21,736,981 transcripts in 128 languages | Parquet + CSV tables |

The trainable and full versions are commercial products. Contact energea@energeatech.com.

## Files

- `csv/videos.csv`, `csv/channels.csv`: tables described below
- `csv/transcripts.csv`: the transcripts, with `channel` and `video_url` repeated on each row for attribution

### videos (one row per video)
`video_id, video_url, title, channel, channel_id, channel_url, upload_date, upload_year,
source_license, original_language, language_id_method, primary_transcript_language,
primary_is_machine_translation, primary_word_count, topic, topic_confidence, format,
quality_flags, transcript_languages, transcript_count, has_original_language_transcript, split`

### channels (one row per channel)
`channel_id, channel, channel_url, video_count, first_upload_date, last_upload_date,
main_original_language, main_topic, total_primary_words, split`

### transcripts (one row per video and language)
`video_id, channel, video_url, language, is_original_language, is_machine_translation,
word_count, character_count, quality_flags, split, text`

## Labels (silver)

Deterministic, rule-derived labels, reproducible from the public fields. They are
not human-verified.

- **topic** (from the title plus the English transcript): education, science_technology, news_politics, government_public_meetings, religion_spirituality, health_medicine, business_finance, gaming, music, sports_fitness, food_cooking, travel_outdoors, autos_vehicles, how_to_diy, arts_culture_history, kids_family, other, unknown. `unknown` means no English
  evidence; `other` means weak evidence. `topic_confidence` is the winning topic's share of evidence.
- **format** (from title and channel name): tts_narration, public_meeting, sermon_worship, lecture_talk, interview_podcast, news_report, tutorial_howto, review_unboxing, gameplay, music_performance, livestream, vlog, other.
- **quality_flags** (semicolon-separated, empty when clean): empty_transcript, very_short, mostly_music_or_noise, highly_repetitive, language_code_repaired.
- **split**: train / validation / test = 98 / 1 / 1, assigned by channel, so no creator appears in
  more than one split.

## License

- The MatrixNorm packaging layer (tables, labels, splits, documentation) is licensed
  **CC BY-NC 4.0** (williamTLmiller), see `LICENSE`.
- The transcripts and video metadata themselves remain **CC BY 4.0** from the original
  creators via PleIAs YouTube-Commons, see `NOTICE` and
  `LICENSE-CC-BY-4.0-UNDERLYING-DATA.txt`. Keep the creator attribution columns when you reuse them.

## Source and limitations

- Source: [PleIAs/YouTube-Commons](https://huggingface.co/datasets/PleIAs/YouTube-Commons) (CC BY 4.0).
- Transcripts are automatic speech recognition and automatic translation output and contain errors.
- E-mail addresses and phone numbers in transcripts are masked as `[EMAIL]` / `[PHONE]`.
- License status is as declared by each uploader on YouTube.
- A small number of source videos (under 0.1%) have no channel name or title in the source; their
  video URL is kept as the attribution link.
- Labels are silver: use them as weak supervision, not ground truth.

Contact: energea@energeatech.com