SYN version 9

Name SYN version 9
Position Number of tokens 5 692 729 712
Number of tokens without punctuation 4 719 008 171
Number of word forms 10 843 867
Number of lemmas 7 375 002
Structures Number of documents 124 247
Number of texts 17 687 333
Number of sentences 362 174 692
Other information Referential YES
Representative NO (predominantly journalism)
Publication year 2021

Every SYN corpus contains all the synchronic written corpora of the SYN series published up until the time of the given version's publication. The corpus SYN version 9 therefore contains the corpora SYN2000, SYN2005, SYN2006PUB, SYN2009PUB, SYN2010,SYN2013PUB, SYN2015 and SYN2020; additionally, it contains a journalistic component predominantly from the years 2010–2019 (already included into SYN version 4, SYN version 5, SYN version 6, SYN version 7 and SYN version 8) and as yet unpublished journalistic texts from 2019 in yearly volume almost 150 mil. words.

The SYN corpus is not representative; the dominant component is journalism, which is the result of the predominance of journalistic corpora SYN2006PUB, SYN2009PUB, SYN2013PUB and the journalistic component from the years 2010–2019.

Continuous annual updates of journalistic texts in the SYN-series corpora also had a side effect: many issues of newspapers and magazines that had previously been included into some of the SYN-series corpora (versions 5 to 8) had to be re-used also in SYN2020. As a consequence of this non-empty intersection of SYN2020 with older SYN-series corpora, SYN version 9 cannot be a disjunctive unification of all its components. However, all the journalistic texts included into both SYN2020 and some other SYN-series corpora are included only once in SYN version 9.

The SYN version 9 corpus is referential, and will remain accessible to users even after newer versions have been published. It is however necessary to keep in mind that the linguistic information will become outdated, as a natural result of the referential nature of the corpus. Individual versions of the corpus SYN will continue to be published regularly every year with the addition of current journalistic data, and every new addition will be given the attribute value <doc syn> equal to the version of the SYN corpus in which the given text first appeared; for example a subcorpus corresponding to the above mentioned (as yet unpublished) journalistic component can be created from the SYN version 9 with the help of the condition syn="v9"1).

Composition of the corpus SYN version 9

Referential written language corpora (synchronic and general) ordered by date of creation
corpus size (words) lemmatization morphological tags publication year corpus description
SYN2020 100M 2020 representative corpus, mainly texts from the years 2015–2019
SYN2015 100M 2015 representative corpus, mainly texts from the years 2010–2014
SYN2013PUB 935M 2013 corpus of journalistic texts from the years 2005–2009
SYN2010 100M 2010 representative corpus, mainly texts from the years 2005–2009
SYN2009PUB 700M 2010 corpus of journalistic texts from the years 1995–2007
SYN2006PUB 300M 2006 corpus of journalistic texts from the years 1989–2004
SYN2005 100M 2005 representative corpus, mainly texts from the years 2000–2004
SYN2000 100M 2000 representative corpus, mainly texts from the years 1990–1999

Journalism in SYN version 9

The composition of the journalistic part of the corpus SYN version 9 covers the production of most of the national daily newspapers (Mladá fronta DNES, Lidové noviny, Právo, Hospodářské noviny, Blesk, Sport), regional daily newspapers (chiefly Deníky Bohemia and Moravia published by Vltava Labe Media) and non-specialized magazines (Reflex, Respekt, Týden) from the years 1998–2019; the total number of journalistic titles is almost 200. The following graphs show the composition of the SYN corpus based on the main text types over the years and offer a closer look at the composition of the journalistic section.

Composition of the corpus SYN version 9
Composition of the journalistic part of the corpus SYN version 9

Structure and annotation of SYN version 9

Generally speaking, structure and annotation of SYN version 9 are based on that of the SYN2020 corpus. In particular, hierarchy of structural tags for SYN version 9 has been taken over from SYN2020, as well as the lemmatization and morphological tagging. Please note that SYN version 9 differs in this from its predecessor, SYN version 8.

This correspondence of structure and annotation between SYN version 9 and SYN2020 only has the following exceptions:

How to cite SYN version 9

Křen, M. – Cvrček, V. – Henyš, J. – Hnátková, M. – Jelínek, T. – Kocek, J. – Kováříková, D. – Křivan, J. – Milička, J. – Petkevič, V. – Procházka, P. – Skoumalová, H. – Šindlerová, J. – Škrabal, M.: Corpus SYN, version 9 from 5. 12. 2021. Ústav Českého národního korpusu FF UK, Praha 2021. Available online: https://www.korpus.cz.

Hnátková, M. – Křen, M. – Procházka, P. – Skoumalová, H. (2014): The SYN-series corpora of written Czech. In Proceedings of the Ninth International Conference on Language Resources and Evaluation (LREC'14), 160–164. Reykjavík: ELRA. ISBN 978-2-9517408-8-4.

Jelínek, T. – Křivan, J. – Petkevič, V. – Skoumalová, H. – Šindlerová, J. (2021): SYN2020: A new corpus of Czech with an innovated annotation. In: K. Ekštein – F. Pártl – M. Konopík (eds.), Text, Speech, and Dialogue. TSD 2021. Lecture Notes in Computer Science, vol. 12848. Cham: Springer, 48–59.

Křivan, J. – Šindlerová, J. (2022): Změny v morfologické anotaci korpusů řady SYN: nové možnosti zkoumání české gramatiky a lexikonu. Slovo a slovesnost, 83, 2/2022, 122–145.

Michal Křen

Related links

1)
Texts from the intersection of SYN2020 with older SYN-series corpora are marked as coming from SYN2020 in this attribute.