dean22029/WTO_Docs

WTO Dispute Settlement Body Documents

Full-text corpus of official WTO Dispute Settlement Body (DSB) documents spanning DS1–DS626, covering January 1995 through early 2026. Sourced from the WTO's public case repository and processed into structured records for retrieval-augmented generation (RAG) and NLP research.

Coverage

Stat	Value
Total records	9,414
Unique cases	626 (DS1–DS626)
Date coverage	~95.5% of records
Document types	42 distinct types
Languages processed	English
Source	WTO Dispute Settlement Gateway

Data Structure

Each line in wto_documents_full.jsonl is a JSON object with the following fields:

Case-level fields (repeated per document within a case)

Field	Type	Description
folder_number	string	Source folder number (matches case number in most cases)
case_number	string	WTO DS case number (e.g. "267" for DS267)
case_title	string	Official WTO case title in uppercase (e.g. "EC - MEASURES CONCERNING MEAT AND MEAT PRODUCTS")
complainant	string	JSON-encoded list of complainant country names
respondent	string	JSON-encoded list of respondent country names
third_parties	string	JSON-encoded list of third-party country names
dispute_stage	string	Furthest procedural stage reached (see Dispute Stages)
agreements_cited	string	WTO agreement articles at issue (raw text from case page)
case_summary	string	Official WTO case summary (scraped from the WTO website)

Document-level fields

Field	Type	Description
original_filename	string	Filename of the source PDF
new_filename	string	Standardized filename: DS{case}_SEQ{nn}_{DocType}[_Variant][_Part].pdf
doc_sequence	integer	Sequential document number within the case
doc_type	string	Consolidated document type (42 categories; see Document Types)
doc_type_raw	string	Raw document type string extracted from the PDF heading
doc_class	string	Filename class: NUMBERED, R_FILE, D_FILE, W_FILE, or CROSS_REF
variant	string or null	Document variant: Add, Corr, Rev, Sup, or null
part_number	integer or null	Part index for multi-part documents (zero-based), or null
date	string or null	Document date extracted from PDF heading (e.g. "14 July 2004"); null if not found
header_codes	string	Official WTO document codes from the heading (e.g. "WT/DS267/1")
agreement_indicators	string	Agreement/article references found in the heading area
page_count	integer	Number of pages in the source PDF
clean_text	string	Full document text cleaned for embedding (headers, boilerplate, and footnotes removed)
processing_date	string	ISO 8601 timestamp of when this record was processed

Document Types

The 42 consolidated document types, with record counts:

Document Type	Count	Description
Communication	1,831	Official communications between parties or from the Secretariat
Request_To_Join_Consultations	1,036	Third-party requests to join ongoing consultations
Status_Report	991	Implementation status reports submitted by respondents
Addendum	958	Addenda to previously circulated documents
Report_Of_Panel	816	Panel reports (full text or interim)
Request_For_Consultations	699	Initial consultation requests filed by complainants
Request_For_Establishment_Of_Panel	541	Formal panel establishment requests
Note_By_Secretariat	538	Informational notes issued by the WTO Secretariat
Report_Of_Appellate_Body	327	Appellate Body reports
Agreement_Art_21_3	158	Article 21.3 DSU reasonable period of time determinations
Notification_Of_Appeal	158	Formal notifications of appeal to the Appellate Body
Working_Procedures	152	Panel or Appellate Body working procedures
Appellate_Body_Report_And_Panel_Report	146	Combined circulation of AB + Panel reports
Recourse	141	Recourse proceedings (Arts. 21.5, 22.2, 22.6, 22.7)
Understanding	133	Bilateral understandings and agreed solutions
Notification_Of_Mutually_Agreed_Solution	122	Formal notifications of mutually agreed solutions
Executive_Summary	101	Executive summaries of panel or AB reports
Submission	88	Party submissions (oral statements, first/second written submissions)
Request_For_Arbitration	87	Arbitration requests under DSU Articles 21.3, 22.6, or 25
Arbitration_Award	65	Awards or decisions by arbitrators
(22 additional types)	~528	Panel compositions, procedural rulings, cross-references, etc.

Dispute Stages

The dispute_stage field reflects the furthest procedural stage reached by each case:

Stage	Records	Description
Appellate Body	3,211	Case reached the Appellate Body
Panel	2,449	Panel established and reported; no appeal
Mutually Agreed Solution	1,597	Parties settled before or during panel proceedings
Implementation & Compliance	1,121	Post-ruling compliance proceedings (Art. 21.5)
Consultation	862	Consultations requested; case did not proceed to panel
Retaliation & Arbitration	163	Authorization to suspend concessions (Art. 22)

Text Cleaning

The clean_text field has been processed through a 10-step pipeline optimized for embedding quality:

1. Header-area boilerplate removal (WTO cover page patterns)
2. Document codes stripped (WT/DS..., G/...)
3. Language markers removed (anglais/English/français)
4. Page numbers removed
5. Footnotes removed (underscore separators + numbered continuations)
6. Non-English lines removed (French/Spanish detected via function-word threshold)
7. Repeated case titles deduplicated
8. Punctuation noise cleaned
9. Whitespace normalized

OCR (Tesseract) was applied as a fallback for 78 scanned PDFs where PyPDF extraction yielded fewer than 50 characters.

Usage Example

With the HuggingFace datasets library (recommended)

from datasets import load_dataset

# Load full dataset
ds = load_dataset("dean22029/WTO_Docs")
df = ds["train"].to_pandas()

# Filter to a single case
ds267 = ds["train"].filter(lambda x: x["case_number"] == "267")

# Filter by document type
consultations = ds["train"].filter(
    lambda x: x["doc_type"] == "Request_For_Consultations"
)

# Filter by dispute stage
appellate = ds["train"].filter(
    lambda x: x["dispute_stage"] == "Appellate Body"
)

# Access a record
print(ds["train"][0]["case_number"])   # "1"
print(ds["train"][0]["doc_type"])      # "Request_For_Consultations"
print(ds["train"][0]["clean_text"][:300])

With plain Python (no dependencies)

import json

with open("wto_documents_full.jsonl") as f:
    for line in f:
        doc = json.loads(line)
        print(doc["case_number"], doc["doc_type"], doc["date"])
        print(doc["clean_text"][:300])
        break

Load all documents for a specific case:

import json

def get_case_docs(jsonl_path, case_number, doc_type=None):
    docs = []
    with open(jsonl_path) as f:
        for line in f:
            doc = json.loads(line)
            if doc["case_number"] == str(case_number):
                if doc_type is None or doc["doc_type"] == doc_type:
                    docs.append(doc)
    return docs

# All documents for DS267 (EC - Beef Hormones)
all_docs = get_case_docs("wto_documents_full.jsonl", 267)

# Consultation requests only
consultations = get_case_docs("wto_documents_full.jsonl", 267, "Request_For_Consultations")

Parse the third_parties field:

import ast

doc = json.loads(line)
third_parties = ast.literal_eval(doc["third_parties"])  # e.g. ["USA", "Canada"]

Data Source and Processing

Documents were scraped from the WTO Dispute Settlement Gateway using Selenium. PDFs were parsed with PyPDFLoader (text-based) and Tesseract OCR (scanned). Dates were extracted multilingually (English, French, Spanish) from PDF headings.

Case metadata (complainant, respondent, third parties, dispute stage, agreements cited, case summary) was scraped separately from WTO case pages and joined by case number.

Known Limitations

• third_parties field stores Python list repr strings (e.g. "['USA', 'EU']"); parse with ast.literal_eval().
• date is null for ~4.5% of records (mostly untitled addenda and cross-reference files).
• Non-English documents (primarily French/Spanish originals) have reduced clean_text quality after line-level language filtering.
• Taiwan (Chinese Taipei) has no UN ideal point data in linked panel datasets — expected, as it is not a UN member.
• DS627+ cases exist in case metadata but have no associated PDFs in this corpus (collection cutoff: DS626).