Merimënga: A Manifest-First Pipeline for Reproducible Albanian Web Corpus Construction

Besim Kabashi, Michael Ruppert


Abstract
We present Merimënga, a pipeline for reproducible Albanian web-corpus construction from Common Crawl. Rather than distributing a static text dump, we publish versioned manifests and append-only JSONL ledgers that make every retrieval and filtering decision replayable at record level. Records are addressed by (WARC filename, byte offset, byte length) and retrieved via HTTP range requests with checksum validation, enabling selective download, resumability, and exact re-materialization. On top of deterministic cleaning and deduplication, Merimënga supports teacher–student filtering: a large LLM labels a stratified sample; the resulting policy is distilled into a faster student model applied at corpus scale. The paper contributes (i) a reproducibility specification for web-corpus construction based on coordinate-addressed retrieval and decision ledgers, (ii) a concrete instantiation for Albanian with language-specific filtering, and (iii) an evaluation protocol for rerun equivalence and filter-stack ablation. Large-scale download and full-corpus filtering are ongoing; this submission focuses on methodology and auditable artifacts rather than final corpus statistics.
Anthology ID:
2026.cmlc-1.3
Volume:
Proceedings of the 12th Workshop on Challenges in the Management of Large Corpora
Month:
May
Year:
2026
Address:
Palma, Mallorca (Spain)
Editors:
Piotr Bański, Dawn Knight, Marc Kupietz, Andreas Witt, Alina Wróblewska
Venues:
CMLC | WS
SIG:
Publisher:
ELRA Language Resources Association (ELRA)
Note:
Pages:
25–31
Language:
External URL:
https://lrec.elra.info/lrec2026-ws-cmlc-03
DOI:
10.63317/4aesmyqqveeo
Bibkey:
Cite (ACL):
Besim Kabashi and Michael Ruppert. 2026. Merimënga: A Manifest-First Pipeline for Reproducible Albanian Web Corpus Construction. In Proceedings of the 12th Workshop on Challenges in the Management of Large Corpora, pages 25–31, Palma, Mallorca (Spain). ELRA Language Resources Association (ELRA).
Cite (Informal):
Merimënga: A Manifest-First Pipeline for Reproducible Albanian Web Corpus Construction (Kabashi & Ruppert, CMLC 2026)
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