RFE/RL Romanian (Moldova) News Text Corpus

Description

This dataset serves as a comprehensive longitudinal news corpus for the Romanian language focused on Moldova, sourced from Europa Liberă Moldova (moldova.europalibera.org), the Moldovan service of Radio Free Europe/Radio Liberty (RFE/RL). Spanning from October 2002 to March 2026, the corpus contains 244,404 unique articles, totaling over 63 million tokens across Romanian, Russian, and English texts. The dataset captures the historical record and linguistic evolution of the region over more than two decades, intentionally preserving the Russian and English articles published alongside the core Romanian content. The files are formatted as plain text with YAML front-matter metadata, making them ready for linguistic analysis, search indexing, and cultural preservation research.

Specifics

Licensing

Creative Commons Attribution Non Commercial Share Alike 4.0 International (CC-BY-NC-SA-4.0)

https://spdx.org/licenses/CC-BY-NC-SA-4.0.html

Considerations

Restrictions/Special Constraints

When using RFE/RL text content in full, we require that you credit RFE/RL by including: • A permanent link, placed before the text of the article, to the original article on www.rferl.org or moldova.europalibera.org • The following text in the article: Copyright (c) 2026 RFE/RL, Inc. Used with the permission of Radio Free Europe/Radio Liberty You must also refrain from altering or distorting the meaning, name, or integrity of the product. When using excerpts of RFE/RL text content, we require that you note that the material is an excerpt and link to the original content somewhere in your text. When translating RFE/RL text content into another language, we require that you note that the material is a translation, state the original language of the text, and provide a link to the original content somewhere in your text. The translated text must not alter or distort the meaning, name, or integrity of the content.

RFE/RL Romanian (Moldova) News Text Corpus (2002–2026)

Overview

This corpus was extracted from the archives of Europa Liberă Moldova (moldova.europalibera.org), the Moldovan Service of Radio Free Europe/Radio Liberty.

Statistics

Total Articles: 244404
Time Period: 2002-10 to 2026-03
Languages:
- Romanian (ro): 225081 articles (~55527260 tokens)
- Russian (ru): 18570 articles (~8164559 tokens)
- English (en): 753 articles (~77980 tokens)

Note on Processing & Multilingual Content:

Language Detection: The language of each article was identified automatically using the pycld2 Python package (version 0.42).
Multilingual Articles: As a multilingual project, Russian and English articles published alongside the Romanian content have been preserved (europalibera.ru.txt and europalibera.en.txt) as potential parallel texts.
Paragraph Structure: Paragraph breaks from the original HTML were preserved to the extent possible.
Formatting: Text has been wrapped at 80 characters for easier inspection in terminal environments. This wrapping is done strictly on whitespace; no words were split or chunked apart.

Data Format

The dataset is provided as text files based on detected language:

europalibera.ro.txt
europalibera.ru.txt
europalibera.en.txt

Inside the files, each article is delimited by a YAML Front Matter block containing metadata, followed by the full article text.

Metadata Fields

url: The canonical URL of the original article.
title: The headline of the article.
date: Publication date (ISO 8601 format: YYYY-MM-DD).
script: The writing system used (latn for Romanian/English, cyrl for Russian).
lang: The detected language code (ro, ru, or en).

Source & License

All content is the property of RFE/RL, Inc. and is protected by U.S. and international copyright laws.

Users of this dataset must adhere to the RFE/RL Terms of Use. Specifically, users must credit RFE/RL in any reuse:

Copyright (c) 2026 RFE/RL, Inc. Used with the permission of Radio Free Europe/Radio Liberty.