The Prague Dependency Treebank

Inspired by the Penn Treebank, the most widely used syntactically annotated corpus of English, this work decided to develop a similarly sized corpus of Czech with a rich annotation scheme.

Abstract

The availability of annotated data (with as rich and "deep" annotation as possible) is desirable in any new developments. Textual data are being used for so-called training phase of various empirical methods solving various problems in the field of computational linguistics. While there are many methods that use texts in their plain (or raw) form (in most cases for so-called unsupervised training), more accurate results may be obtained if annotated corpora are available. The data annotation itself is a complex task. While morphologically annotated corpora (pioneered by Henry Kučera in the 60's) are now available for English and other languages, syntactically annotated corpora are rare. Inspired by the Penn Treebank, the most widely used syntactically annotated corpus of English, we decided to develop a similarly sized corpus of Czech with a rich annotation scheme.