About the NKJP Project

A linguistic corpus is a collection of texts where one can find the typical use of a single word or a phrase, as well as their meaning and grammatical function. Nowadays, without access to a language corpus, it has become impossible to do linguistic research, to write dictionaries, grammars and language teaching books, to create search engines sensitive to Polish inflection, machine translation engines and software of advanced language technology. Language corpora have become an essential tool for linguists, but they are also helpful for software engineers, scholars of literature and culture, historians, librarians and other specialists of art and computer sciences.

There already exist national corpora compiled by the British, Germans, Czech and Russians. Polish people also need an extensive, well balanced language corpus – a language source which can be accessed online.

The National Corpus of Polish is a shared initiative of four institutions: Institute of Computer Science at the Polish Academy of Sciences (coordinator), Institute of Polish Language at the Polish Academy of Sciences, Polish Scientific Publishers PWN, and the Department of Computational and Corpus Linguistics at the University of Łódź. It has been carried out as a research-development project of the Ministry of Science and Higher Education.

These four institutions have started cooperation to build a reference corpus of Polish language containing over fifteen hundred millions of words. The corpus is searchable by means of advanced tools that analyse Polish inflection and the Polish sentence structure.

The list of sources for the corpora contains classic literature, daily newspapers, specialist periodicals and journals, transcripts of conversations, and a variety of short-lived and internet texts. For a corpus to be reliable, not only it is necessary to contain a high number of words, but it also needs a diversity of texts with respect to the subject and genre. The conversations ought to represent both male and female speakers, in various age groups, coming from various regions in Poland.