The corpus was developed in the course of a research project at the University of Essex, in collaboration with the Open University. The corpus contains Al-Hayat newspaper articles with value added for Language Engineering and Information Retrieval applications development purposes. The data have been distributed into 7 subject-specific databases, thus following the Al-Hayat subject tags: General, Car, Computer, News, Economics, Science, and Sport. Mark-up, numbers, special characters and punctuation have been removed. The size of the total file is 268 MB. The dataset contains 18,639,264 distinct tokens in 42,591 articles, organised in 7 domains.