Kaidon-Ng/singapore-statutes

Singapore Statutes and Subsidiary Legislation

A structured, section-level dataset of all Singapore statutes (Acts) and subsidiary legislation (Regulations, Rules, Orders) from Singapore Statutes Online (SSO).

Disclaimer

This is an unofficial reproduction of Singapore legislation sourced from Singapore Statutes Online (sso.agc.gov.sg). It is not and should not be relied upon as the authoritative text of Singapore legislation. The official text is the version published in the Government Gazette.

Source: Attorney-General's Chambers of Singapore via Singapore Statutes Online.

Use of this dataset is subject to SSO's Terms of Use.

Dataset Summary

	Count
Acts (primary legislation)	535
Subsidiary Legislation (regulations, rules, orders)	1782
Total documents	2317
Total sections (text chunks)	55,221
Act sections	28,943
Subsidiary Legislation sections	26,278

This dataset provides parsed, section-level text rather than raw PDFs. Each section includes its hierarchical position (Part, Division) and parent document metadata. Subsidiary legislation is linked to its parent Act.

Data Structure

documents.parquet — Document metadata

Column	Type	Description
name	string	Act or SL name (e.g. "Employment Act 1968")
doc_type	string	"act" or "subsidiary_legislation"
parent_act	string	Parent Act name (SL only, empty for Acts)
page_count	int	Number of pages in source PDF
num_sections	int	Number of parsed sections

sections.parquet — Section-level text

Column	Type	Description
doc_name	string	Parent document name
doc_type	string	"act" or "subsidiary_legislation"
parent_act	string	Parent Act name (SL only)
section_title	string	Section heading (e.g. "14. Termination of contract without notice")
part	string	Part heading (e.g. "PART 4 REST DAYS, HOURS OF WORK AND OTHER CONDITIONS")
division	string	Division heading if applicable
pages	string	JSON array of source PDF page numbers
text	string	Full section text

Use Cases

• Legal NLP: Train or evaluate models on Singapore statutory text
• Legal information retrieval: Build search systems over structured legislation
• Knowledge graph construction: Act-SL hierarchies, cross-references between statutes
• Statutory definition extraction: Interpretation sections contain formal term definitions
• Comparative law: Compare Singapore legislation structure with other common law jurisdictions
• RAG (Retrieval-Augmented Generation): Section-level chunks ready for embedding and retrieval

How to Load

from datasets import load_dataset

# Load both splits
docs = load_dataset("Kaidon-Ng/singapore-statutes", data_files="data/documents.parquet", split="train")
sections = load_dataset("Kaidon-Ng/singapore-statutes", data_files="data/sections.parquet", split="train")

# Filter by type
acts_only = sections.filter(lambda x: x["doc_type"] == "act")
sl_only = sections.filter(lambda x: x["doc_type"] == "subsidiary_legislation")

# Get all sections from Employment Act
ea = sections.filter(lambda x: x["doc_name"] == "Employment Act 1968")

Source and License

• Source: Singapore Statutes Online (SSO), Attorney-General's Chambers of Singapore
• License: Subject to SSO Terms of Use
• Official text: The Government Gazette version is the authoritative text of Singapore legislation
• Processing: PDFs parsed into structured JSON, then flattened to section-level Parquet

Limitations

• This is an unofficial reproduction and may contain parsing artifacts from PDF extraction
• Legislation text may not reflect the most recent amendments
• Some sections may have formatting issues from PDF-to-text conversion
• Does not include repealed legislation or historical versions
• Does not include case law or judicial interpretations

Citation

If you use this dataset in your research, please cite:

@misc{singapore_statutes_sso,
  title={Singapore Statutes and Subsidiary Legislation (SSO)},
  author={LawBot Project},
  year={2026},
  publisher={HuggingFace},
  url={https://huggingface.co/datasets/Kaidon-Ng/singapore-statutes}
}