The Szeged Corpus: A POS Tagged and Syntactically Annotated Hungarian Natural Language Corpus

The Szeged Corpus is a manually annotated natural language corpus currently comprising 1.2 million word entries, 145 thousand different word forms, and an additional 225 thousand punctuation marks. With this, it is the largest manually processed Hungarian textual database that serves as a reference material for research in natural language processing as well as a learning database for machine learning algorithms and other software applications. Language processing of the corpus texts so far included morpho-syntactic analysis, POS tagging and shallow syntactic parsing. Semantic information was also added to a preselected section of the corpus to support automated information extraction. The present state of the Szeged Corpus (Alexin et al., 2003) is the result of three national projects and the cooperation of the University of Szeged, Department of Informatics, MorphoLogic Ltd. Budapest, and the Research Institute for Linguistics at the Hungarian Academy of Sciences. Corpus texts have gone through different phases of natural language processing (NLP) and analysis. Extensive and accurate manual annotation of the texts, incorporating over 124 person-months of manual work, is a great value of the corpus. 1 Texts of the Szeged Corpus When selecting texts for the Szeged Corpus, the main criteria was that they should be thematically representative of different text types. The first version of the corpus, therefore, contains texts from five genres, roughly 200 thousand words each. Due to its relative variability, it serves as a good reference material for natural language research applications, and proves to be large enough to guarantee the robustness of machine learning methods. Genres of Szeged Corpus 1.0 include: • fiction (two Hungarian novels and the Hungarian translation of Orwell's 1984) • compositions of 14-16-year-old students • newspaper articles (excerpts from three daily and one weekly paper) • computer-related texts (excerpts from a Windows 20001 manual book and some issues of the ComputerWorld, Számítástechnika magazine) • law (excerpts from legal texts on economic enterprises and authors' rights).