Herein, we present the process of developing the first Hungarian Dependency TreeBank. First, short references are made to dependency grammars we considered important in the development of our Treebank. Second, mention is made of existing dependency corpora for other languages. Third, we present the steps of converting the Szeged Treebank into dependency-tree format: from the originally phrase-structured treebank, we produced dependency trees by automatic conversion, checked and corrected them thereby creating the first manually annotated dependency corpus for Hungarian. We also go into detail about the two major sets of problems, i.e. coordination and predicative nouns and adjectives. Fourth, we give statistics on the treebank: by now, we have completed the annotation of business news, newspaper articles, legal texts and texts in informatics, at the same time, we are planning to convert the entire corpus into dependency tree format. Finally, we give some hints on the applicability of the system: the present database may be utilized ― among others ― in information extraction and machine translation as well.

To create the first Hungarian WSD corpus, 39 suitable word form samples were selected for the purpose of word sense disambiguation. Among others, selection criteria required the given word form to be frequent in Hungarian language usage, and to have more than one sense considered frequent in usage. HNC and its Heti Világgazdaság subcorpus provided the basis for corpus text selection. This way, each sample has a relevant context (whole article), and information on the lemma, POS-tagging and automatic tokenization is also available. When planning the corpus, 300-500 samples of each word form were to be annotated. This size makes it possible that the subcorpora prepared for the individual word forms can be compared to data available for other languages. However, the finalized database also contains unannotated samples and samples with single annotation, which were annotated only by one of the linguists. The corpus follows the ACL’s SensEval/SemEval WSD tasks format. The first version of the corpus was developed within the scope of the project titled The construction Hungarian WordNet Ontology and its application in Information Extraction Systems (Hatvani et al., 2007). The corpus “ for research and educational purposes” is available and can be downloaded free of charge.