BBC Datasets

Two news article datasets, originating from BBC News, provided for use as benchmarks for machine learning research. These datasets are made available for non-commercial and research purposes only. If you make use of these datasets please consider citing the publication:

• D. Greene and P. Cunningham. “Practical Solutions to the Problem of Diagonal Dominance in Kernel Document Clustering”, Proc. ICML 2006. [PDF] [BibTeX]

All rights, including copyright, in the content of the original articles are owned by the BBC.

Dataset: BBC

Consists of 2225 documents from the BBC news website corresponding to stories in five topical areas from 2004-2005. Class Labels: 5 (business, entertainment, politics, sport, tech)

• Download pre-processed dataset

• Download raw text files

Dataset: BBCSport

Consists of 737 documents from the BBC Sport website corresponding to sports news articles in five topical areas from 2004-2005. Class Labels: 5 (athletics, cricket, football, rugby, tennis)

• Download pre-processed dataset
• Download raw text files

File formats

The datasets have been pre-processed as follows: stemming (Porter algorithm), stop-word removal (stop word list) and low term frequency filtering (count < 3) have already been applied to the data. The files contained in the archives given above have the following formats:

• *.mtx: Original term frequencies stored in a sparse data matrix in Matrix Market format.
• *.terms: List of content-bearing terms in the corpus, with each line corresponding to a row of the sparse data matrix.
• *.docs: List of document identifiers, with each line corresponding to a column of the sparse data matrix.
• *.classes: Assignment of documents to natural classes, with each line corresponding to a document.
• *.urls: Links to original articles, where available.