Building an electronic language database nowadays: The Prague Dependency Treebank

1. I am sure that the domain of the creation of the large language corpora, where linguistic annotations are assigned to the input data, still belongs to the interests of the Festschrift's owner. I met Prof. Ferenc Papp for the first time in 1964 in Prague at the Colloquium on Mathematical Linguistics and we immediately have found a common basis of interest: how to store linguistic data about raw texts and how to deal with them using the contemporary technical equipment. At that time the most advanced technique for natural language processing available for linguists was represented by punch-card machines. In October, 1964, Ferenc Papp organized a small conference in Budapest, where the participants (I had the honour to be one of them) exchanged their opinions on what type of data can be stored on punch-cards, how they can be classified and evaluated from the point of view of their linguistic nature as well as from the point of view of the efficiency and role of the punch-card machine set. Reminding this in 2000, in the year of F. Papp's anniversary, the whole issue sounds as a kind of a crazy nostalgia. The punch-card machines disappeared very soon and the punch-cards, storing the rich inventory of linguistic data, become unreadable. However, the idea remains alive: In the 1980s corpus linguistics was born and in the 1990s (syntactically) annotated corpora started to develop.