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Clawling could be difficult due to some issues of the website. Also, please consider another option such as using publicly available files at your own risk.

For example,

• a file by Shawn Presser: It was crawled in September 2020, and each book was separately stored as a text file. Looks nice! Thank you @shawwn!
• a file by Igor Brigadir: While it could be similar to the original BookCorpus, all books seemed concatenated. And, I don't know the detail. Please see some discussion about the dataset or ask the distributer.
• a dataset class by huggingface/datasets: This internally accesses the file above (by Igor) but easy to use in some cases.

And, a paper by Jack Bandy and Nicholas Vincent is also valuable for understanding how "BookCorpus" and its replicates include several deficiencies.

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These are scripts to reproduce BookCorpus by yourself.

BookCorpus is a popular large-scale text corpus, espetially for unsupervised learning of sentence encoders/decoders. However, BookCorpus is no longer distributed...

This repository includes a crawler collecting data from smashwords.com, which is the original source of BookCorpus. Collected sentences may partially differ but the number of them will be larger or almost the same. If you use the new corpus in your work, please specify that it is a replica.

Prepare URLs of available books. However, this repository already has a list as url_list.jsonl which was a snapshot I (@soskek) collected on Jan 19-20, 2019. You can use it if you'd like.

python -u download_list.py > url_list.jsonl &

Download their files. Downloading is performed for txt files if possible. Otherwise, this tries to extract text from epub. The additional argument --trash-bad-count filters out epub files whose word count is largely different from its official stat (because it may imply some failure).

python download_files.py --list url_list.jsonl --out out_txts --trash-bad-count

The results are saved into the directory of --out (here, out_txts).

Make concatenated text with sentence-per-line format.

python make_sentlines.py out_txts > all.txt

If you want to tokenize them into segmented words by Microsoft's BlingFire, run the below. You can use another choices for this by yourself.

python make_sentlines.py out_txts | python tokenize_sentlines.py > all.tokenized.txt

For example, you can refer to terms of smashwords.com. Please use the code responsibly and adhere to respective copyright and related laws. I am not responsible for any plagiarism or legal implication that rises as a result of this repository.

• python3 is recommended
• beautifulsoup4
• progressbar2
• blingfire
• html2text
• lxml

pip install -r requirements.txt

• It is expected some error messages are shown, e.g., Failed: epub and txt, File is not a zip file or Failed to open. But, the number of failures will be much less than one of successes. Don't worry.

epub2txt.py is derived and modified from https://github.com/kevinxiong/epub2txt/blob/master/epub2txt.py

If you found this code useful, please cite it with the URL.

@misc{soskkobayashi2018bookcorpus,
    author = {Sosuke Kobayashi},
    title = {Homemade BookCorpus},
    howpublished = {\url{https://github.com/soskek/bookcorpus}},
    year = {2018}
}

Also, the original papers which made the original BookCorpus are as follows:

Yukun Zhu, Ryan Kiros, Richard Zemel, Ruslan Salakhutdinov, Raquel Urtasun, Antonio Torralba, Sanja Fidler. "Aligning Books and Movies: Towards Story-like Visual Explanations by Watching Movies and Reading Books." arXiv preprint arXiv:1506.06724, ICCV 2015.

@InProceedings{Zhu_2015_ICCV,
    title = {Aligning Books and Movies: Towards Story-Like Visual Explanations by Watching Movies and Reading Books},
    author = {Zhu, Yukun and Kiros, Ryan and Zemel, Rich and Salakhutdinov, Ruslan and Urtasun, Raquel and Torralba, Antonio and Fidler, Sanja},
    booktitle = {The IEEE International Conference on Computer Vision (ICCV)},
    month = {December},
    year = {2015}
}

@inproceedings{moviebook,
    title = {Aligning Books and Movies: Towards Story-like Visual Explanations by Watching Movies and Reading Books},
    author = {Yukun Zhu and Ryan Kiros and Richard Zemel and Ruslan Salakhutdinov and Raquel Urtasun and Antonio Torralba and Sanja Fidler},
    booktitle = {arXiv preprint arXiv:1506.06724},
    year = {2015}
}

Ryan Kiros, Yukun Zhu, Ruslan Salakhutdinov, Richard S. Zemel, Antonio Torralba, Raquel Urtasun, and Sanja Fidler. "Skip-Thought Vectors." arXiv preprint arXiv:1506.06726, NIPS 2015.

@article{kiros2015skip,
    title={Skip-Thought Vectors},
    author={Kiros, Ryan and Zhu, Yukun and Salakhutdinov, Ruslan and Zemel, Richard S and Torralba, Antonio and Urtasun, Raquel and Fidler, Sanja},
    journal={arXiv preprint arXiv:1506.06726},
    year={2015}
}