Vietnamese Legal Documents
A comprehensive dataset of 518,255 Vietnamese legal documents sourced from thuvienphapluat.vn — the largest Vietnamese legal document repository. The dataset covers laws, decrees, circulars, decisions, and other official documents issued by Vietnamese government bodies, spanning from 1924 to 2026.
At a Glance
| 🗂️ Total documents | 518,255 |
| 📅 Date range | 1924 – 2026 |
| 🏛️ Issuing authorities | 1,335 unique bodies |
| 📋 Document types | 36 unique types |
| 🌐 Language | Vietnamese |
| 💾 Content size | ~3.6 GB (parquet) |
Dataset Structure
This dataset is split into two configs to allow fast metadata access without loading the full text.
| Config | Split | Rows | Size | Description |
|---|---|---|---|---|
metadata |
data |
518,255 | ~82 MB | 9 metadata columns, no text content |
content |
data |
518,255 | ~3.6 GB | id + full markdown document text |
Join on the id column to get both metadata and content.
Load the Dataset
from datasets import load_dataset
# Load metadata only (fast, ~82 MB)
ds = load_dataset("th1nhng0/vietnamese-legal-documents", "metadata")
df = ds["data"].to_pandas()
print(df.head())
# Load full text content (~3.6 GB)
ds_content = load_dataset("th1nhng0/vietnamese-legal-documents", "content")
# Join metadata + content
import pandas as pd
meta = load_dataset("th1nhng0/vietnamese-legal-documents", "metadata")["data"].to_pandas()
text = load_dataset("th1nhng0/vietnamese-legal-documents", "content")["data"].to_pandas()
df = meta.merge(text, on="id")
print(df.columns.tolist())
Schema
metadata config
| Column | Type | Description |
|---|---|---|
id |
int64 | Unique numeric document ID |
document_number |
string | Official document number (e.g. 115/NQ-HĐBCQG) |
title |
string | Full Vietnamese title |
url |
string | Source URL on thuvienphapluat.vn |
legal_type |
string | Document type (Quyết định, Công văn, Nghị quyết, …) |
legal_sectors |
string | Pipe-separated sector/topic tags |
issuing_authority |
string | Name of the issuing government body |
issuance_date |
string | Issue date in DD/MM/YYYY format |
signers |
string | Pipe-separated name:id pairs of signatories |
content config
| Column | Type | Description |
|---|---|---|
id |
int64 | Document ID — join key with the metadata config |
content |
string | Full document text converted to Markdown |
Statistics
Documents by Year
Top 15 Document Types
Top 15 Legal Sectors
Use Cases
- 🔍 Legal information retrieval — build search engines over Vietnamese law
- 🤖 LLM fine-tuning — train or fine-tune language models on legal Vietnamese
- 📊 Legal NLP research — NER, classification, summarization, QA
- 📈 Policy analysis — track legislative trends over time
- 🌏 Low-resource NLP — Vietnamese legal text is underrepresented in existing datasets
Data Collection
This is an independent personal research project. Documents were collected from thuvienphapluat.vn — a public legal document portal — via their sitemap. This project has no affiliation with thuvienphapluat.vn.
HTML content was converted to Markdown using BeautifulSoup. Only Vietnamese-language documents were retained; English versions and technical standards (Tiêu chuẩn) were excluded.
License & Legal Basis
Vietnamese legal documents (laws, decrees, circulars, decisions, and other normative acts) are public domain by Vietnamese law. Under the Law on Access to Information (Luật Tiếp cận thông tin, No. 104/2016/QH13) and the Law on Promulgation of Legal Documents (No. 64/2025/QH15), official legal normative documents issued by state agencies must be made publicly accessible free of charge.
The compiled dataset (collection, processing, metadata schema, and Markdown conversion) is released under CC BY 4.0.
Intended for research purposes only.
Citation
@dataset{ngo_thinh_2026_vietnamese_legal,
title = {Vietnamese Legal Documents},
author = {Ngô, Thịnh},
year = {2026},
publisher = {Hugging Face},
url = {https://huggingface.co/datasets/th1nhng0/vietnamese-legal-documents},
note = {518,255 Vietnamese legal documents compiled for research purposes}
}
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