oracc-parser

A Python tool to download and parse ORACC cuneiform text projects into machine-learning-ready formats (JSONL, CSV, pandas DataFrames).

Features

• Download — Fetch project ZIPs from preprocessed files on Zenodo or directly from ORACC
• Parse — Convert raw ORACC JSON / preprocessed CSVs into structured data and create machine-learning-ready text representations (in transliteration, normalization, lemmatization, or Unicode cuneiform)
• Configure — Control handling of broken signs and POS masking
• Export — Save datasets as JSONL, CSV, or pandas DataFrames

How to Cite

If you use oracc-parser in your research, please cite:

@software{romach_oracc_parser_2026,
  author       = {Romach, Avital and Spencer, Shahar and Gordin, Shai},
  title        = {oracc-parser: A Python toolkit for downloading and parsing ORACC cuneiform text projects},
  year         = {2026},
  publisher    = {Zenodo},
  version      = {0.1.5},
  doi          = {10.5281/zenodo.18643122},
  url          = {https://doi.org/10.5281/zenodo.18643122}
}

Installation

pip install oracc-parser

Or for development:

git clone https://github.com/shaharspencer/oracc-parser.git
cd oracc-parser
pip install -e ".[dev]"

Getting Started — Notebooks

The easiest way to explore oracc-parser is through the interactive notebooks, that go through the main functions.

Notebook	What you'll learn	Open in Colab
01_quickstart.ipynb	Download the dataset → parse a project → explore transliterations, translations, and metadata → export
02_configurations.ipynb	RunConfig options — word-level and sign-level break filtering, POS masking, combining multiple projects and exporting datasets
03_translations.ipynb	Where translations come from, how to download the translation cache from Zenodo, and how to enable translations in the parsing pipeline
04_reference_data.ipynb	Browse all projects in the dataset, query catalogues, explore bundled reference data (provenance, periods, sign list, POS tags)
05_oracc_json_processing.ipynb	Advanced: understand the raw ORACC JSON structure, the JSON → TabletRecord → CSV pipeline, and how to download and parse projects not in the dataset

pip install oracc-parser[notebooks]
jupyter notebook notebooks/

Quick Example

from oracc_parser.download.fetch_data import fetch_data
from oracc_parser import parse_project, RunConfig, get_full_flat_table

# Step 1: download catalogues from Zenodo (run once)
fetch_data()

# Step 2: parse a project — word CSVs fetched from Zenodo on first call,
# read from disk on subsequent calls
records = parse_project("saao/saa01", config=RunConfig(limit=5))

# Get a flat DataFrame — no nesting, ready for analysis
df = get_full_flat_table(records)
df.to_json("dataset.jsonl", orient="records", lines=True)

# For a project not on Zenodo, download directly from ORACC servers:
records = parse_project("my/project", download_from_oracc_server=True)

Configuration

You can customize the parsing process using RunConfig:

from oracc_parser import parse_project, RunConfig

records = parse_project("saao/saa01", config=RunConfig(
    limit=10,
    max_break_fraction=0.5,   # word-level: drop words that are >50% broken
    drop_missing=True,        # sign-level: drop [x] signs from Unicode output
    drop_damaged=False,       # sign-level: keep ⸢x⸣ signs in Unicode output
    mask_pos=["PN", "DN"],    # replace personal/divine names with tag
))

Two independent levels of break filtering

RunConfig provides two distinct ways to handle damaged or missing text, operating at different granularities and affecting different outputs:

Note: Because word-level and sign-level filtering use different thresholds and different granularities, the text outputs and the Unicode cuneiform output are not aligned. A word kept in the transliteration (because its average damage is below max_break_fraction) may still have individual signs dropped from the Unicode output if drop_missing / drop_damaged are enabled. None of these filters affect the translations.

Other options

All reference data is bundled with the package, so you don't need to configure external paths unless you are customizing oracc_parser.settings.

CLI

oracc-parser download --project saao/saa01
oracc-parser parse --project saao/saa01 --limit 5 --format jsonl --output saa01.jsonl

Heavy Data (Zenodo)

Large data files (ORACC ZIPs, word-level CSVs, cached translations, Pleiades data) are on Zenodo:

python scripts/download_zenodo_data.py

Running Tests

pytest tests/ -v     # 98 tests

License

MIT — see LICENSE.

Credits

Based on code by Niek Veldhuis (Compass) and adapted for the BEn Project.