InterCorp Release 13ud – Universal Dependencies

After registration the corpus can be searched using a web interface. The registration is valid for all ICNC corpora with public access. If you already have a user name and password for the Czech part of the Czech National Corpus, you do not need to register for the parallel corpus.

InterCorp can be accessed via a standard web browser from KonText, the integrated search interface of the Czech National Corpus. A tutorial is available in Czech, for one of the ICNC corpora also in English and for InterCorp a summary also in English.

After signing a non-profit licence agreement, texts from InterCorp can also be acquired as bilingual files including shuffled pairs of sentences. Please contact Martin Vavřín if you are interested.

New release of InterCorp is usually published once per year. With each new release, its size, possibly also the number of languages and the extent and quality of annotation may grow. Previous versions remain available (starting with release 6). The linguistic annotation of release 13ud is based on the Universal Dependencies scheme.

• In release 13ud, out of the total number of 41 languages ​​(including Czech), 36 are linguistically annotated; in addition, all such languages ​​are syntactically annotated.
• Texts are annotated in the same way in all languages, according to the UD standard (Universal Dependencies).
• For a detailed description of UD as used in the annotation of InterCorp see Universal Dependencies.
• Annotation was performed for all languages ​​by UDPipe, based on the data created in the UD project.¹⁾

InterCorp release 13ud contains the same texts as InterCorp release 13. They differ only in linguistic annotation. However, the token and word count data in release 13ud may differ slightly due to a different tokenization method.

The core of InterCorp consists mostly of fiction, manually aligned. Intercorp offers also a selection of fully automatically processed texts, so-called collections. The choice in the present release includes:

• Political commentaries published by Project Syndicate and VoxEurop (formerly PressEurop)
• A package of legal texts of the European Union form the Acquis Communautaire corpus
• Proceedings of the European Parliament dated 2007–2011 from the Europarl corpus
• Film subtitles from the Open Subtitles database
• Translations of the Bible

These texts have been aligned automatically: search results may include a higher number of misaligned segments. Morevore, the collections do not retain all texts from the original resource. This includes texts that have no Czech counterpart. Some texts from the Acquis Communautaire and Europarl corpora have been partially corrected or omitted – as a result, they may differ in form or size if compared with the original source. A similar selection was applied to the Open Subtitles database, where – as an additional reduction – only a single translation was selected per title and language. On the other hand, some metadata items missing in the original resource but detectable from context or other sources have been added.

Each text has a Czech counterpart. As a result, Czech is the pivot language: for every text there is a single Czech version (original or translation), aligned with one or more foreign-language versions. The total size of the available part of InterCorp in release 13 published in November 2020 is 328 mil. words in the aligned foreign language texts in the core part and 1,223 mil. words in the collections. The number of words in the Czech texts is 114 mil. in the core part and 90 mil. in the collections (see Version history). The share of the core and the collections in the corpus can be seen in the following charts. The charts show the volumes in millions of words.

Setup of the parallel corpus – the core and collections

Setup of the parallel corpus – the core

Setup of the parallel corpus – collections

N.B. 1: Languages printed in italics have no linguistic annotation.

N.B. 2: Each Czech text is counted only once, even though it may have more than one foreign counterpart.

We are grateful for the possibility to use the following texts and software:

• The latest (13th corrected) issue of the Czech Ecumenical Translation of the Bible could be included to the corpus thanks to the Czech Biblical Society, especially Petr Fryš.
• Fiction in many Slavic and some other languages from ASPAC – Amsterdam Slavic Parallel Aligned Corpus – with special thanks to Adrian Barentsen
• Political commentaries in a number of languages from the site Project Syndicate
• Newspaper texts in a number of languages from the Presseurop/VoxEurop server
• Legal texts in EU languages from the JRC-ACQUIS corpus
• Proceedings of the European Parliament from the EuroParl corpus
• Slovak-Czech concordances from the Slovak National Corpus
• Short stories in a number of languages My 1989 from Goethe Institut
• A number of texts in the Czech-Lithuanian section of the corpus and Jiří Levý's The Art of Translation in more languages – with special thanks to Patrick Corness
• George Orwell's novel 1984 in a number of languages from the Multext-East corpus
• Ukrainian and Polish texts from the PolUkr corpus
• Norwegian texts from the publishers Aschehoug & co., Cappelen Forlag and Forlaget Oktober
• Film subtitles from the database Open Subtitles

• Parallel text editor InterText by Pavel Vondřička
• Aligner Hunalign
• Sentence splitter for Czech by Pavel Květoň
• Sentence splitter for Norwegian by Jarle Ebeling and Pavel Vondřička
• Sentence splitter Punkt for all other languages from Natural Language Toolkit

* UDPipe (thanks to Jana Straková and Milan Straka, Dan Zeman and Martin Popel)

If you publish results based on InterCorp we would appreciate a link to the project site www.intercorp.korpus.cz. In your scientific publications please cite the following paper: