# FineFreq: A Multilingual Character Frequency Dataset from Web-Scale Text

arXiv: https://arxiv.org/abs/2512.09701 · HTML: https://mlsanity.com/paper/2512.09701/

## Key facts

- No citing papers in the map yet (data through 14 Oct 2026).
- Builds on 6 of its 15 references that are in the map.
- First posted on arXiv 10 Dec 2025.

## Builds on (most cited first, 6 of 6)

- [The FineWeb Datasets: Decanting the Web for the Finest Text Data at Scale](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2406.17557/) (2024)
- [The RefinedWeb Dataset for Falcon LLM: Outperforming Curated Corpora with Web Data, and Web Data Only](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2306.01116/) (2023)
- [Challenges in Detoxifying Language Models](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2109.07445/) (2021)
- [FineWeb2: One Pipeline to Scale Them All -- Adapting Pre-Training Data Processing to Every Language](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2506.20920/) (2025)
- [Learning to Align: Addressing Character Frequency Distribution Shifts in Handwritten Text Recognition](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2506.09846/) (2025)
- [Training Kindai OCR with parallel textline images and self-attention feature distance-based loss](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2508.08537/) (2025)

## Abstract (arXiv)

We present FineFreq, a large-scale multilingual character frequency dataset derived from the FineWeb and FineWeb2 corpora, covering over 1900 languages and spanning 2013-2025. The dataset contains frequency counts for 96 trillion characters processed from 57 TB of compressed text. For each language, FineFreq provides per-character statistics with aggregate and year-level frequencies, allowing fine-grained temporal analysis. The dataset preserves naturally occurring multilingual features such as cross-script borrowings, emoji, and acronyms without applying artificial filtering. Each character entry includes Unicode metadata (category, script, block), enabling domain-specific or other downstream filtering and analysis. The full dataset is released in both CSV and Parquet formats, with associated metadata, available on GitHub and HuggingFace. https://github.com/Bin-2/FineFreq