CzeSL – a Learner Corpus of Czech

• The Corpus of Czech as a Second Language
• Supported in 2009–2012 by a European Social Funds (ESF) grant Innovative approach to teaching Czech as a second language, no. CZ.1.07/2.2.00/07.0119
• A part of the AKCES/CLAC project (the Czech Language Acquisition Corpora)
• For the official site see AKCES – Akviziční korpusy českého jazyka (in Czech)
• An outdated site: Investice do rozvoje vzdělávání v oboru čeština jako cizí jazyk (Investments into Teaching Czech as a Foreign Language)

Available versions

CzeSL-plain

• Transcribed texts, 2 mil. words, without annotation, without metadata
• Consists of 3 parts:
  • Texts written by foreign learners of Czech (ciz)
  • Academic texts written by foreign students in Czech (kval)
  • Texts written by Czech students with Romani background (rom)
• Searchable from the Czech National Corpus site
• Downloadable from the LINDAT-Clarin data repository as two subcorpora:
  • AKCES 3 – includes texts produced by non-native students of Czech
  • AKCES 4 – includes texts produced by students growing up in socially excluded communities
• Description in English and Czech

CzeSL-SGT

• Czech as a Second Language with Spelling, Grammar and Tags
• Transcribed texts, 1 mil. words
• Extends the “foreign” (ciz) part of CzeSL-plain by texts collected in 2013
• Original forms and automatic corrections are tagged, lemmatized and assigned error labels
• Most texts have metadata attributes (30 items) about the author and the text
• Searchable from the Czech National Corpus site, metadata available from this site are in Czech
• Dowloadable as AKCES 5 (CzeSL-SGT) Release 2 with the metadata in English. The original release is still available from AKCES 5 (CzeSL-SGT). We suggest the use of Release 2, where a number of bugs were fixed, including an issue in the metadata: native speakers of Ukrainian were labelled as speakers of “another Indo-European language” rather than as speakers of a Slavic language. Release 2 is now also a validated XML document with all annotation represented as XML attributes.
• Description in English and Czech

CzeSL-man

• Includes texts collected, transcribed and manually annotated within the ESF project, see a description in English.
• Texts searchable on-line via the SeLaQ tool, using the CzeSL-native format:
  • Includes all manually annotated texts, both the non-native Czech and the Romani ethnolect Czech parts.
  • SeLaQ is a purpose-built corpus manager. See its menu for instructions.
  • Note that metadata and graphical display of links between annotated word tokens are not available in SeLaQ.
• Downloadable from here in the feat format, with metadata
• Coming soon: CzeSL-man searchable from the Czech National Corpus site and downloadable from the LINDAT/CLARIN repository.

Tools

• Annotation editor feat

Additional documentation

• Annotation manual in Czech
• Transcription manual in Czech
• Appendix to Transcription manual in Czech
• Transcription manual – summary in English

Bibliography