The paper concentrates on the design, composition and annotation of SYN2015, a new 100-million representative corpus of contemporary written Czech. SYN2015 is a sequel of the representative corpora of the SYN series that can be described as traditional (as opposed to the web-crawled corpora), featuring cleared copyright issues, well-defined composition, reliability of annotation and high-quality text processing. At the same time, SYN2015 is designed as a reflection of the variety of written Czech text production with necessary methodological and technological enhancements that include a detailed bibliographic annotation and text classification based on an updated scheme. The corpus has been produced using a completely rebuilt text processing toolchain called SynKorp. SYN2015 is lemmatized, morphologically and syntactically annotated with state-of-the-art tools. It has been published within the framework of the Czech National Corpus and it is available via the standard corpus query interface KonText at http://kontext.korpus.cz as well as a dataset in shuffled format.

InterText is a flexible manager and editor for alignment of parallel texts aimed both at individual and collaborative creation of parallel corpora of any size or translational memories. It is available in two versions: as a multi-user server application with a web-based interface and as a native desktop application for personal use. Both versions are able to cooperate with each other. InterText can process plain text or custom XML documents, deploy existing automatic aligners and provide a comfortable interface for manual post-alignment correction of both the alignment and the text contents and segmentation of the documents. One language version may be aligned with several other versions (using stand-off alignment) and the application ensures consistency between them. The server version supports different user levels and privileges and it can also track changes made to the texts for easier supervision. It also allows for batch import, alignment and export and can be connected to other tools and scripts for better integration in a more complex project workflow.

This paper presents the Kachna corpus of spontaneous speech, in which ten Czech and ten Norwegian speakers were recorded both in their native language and in English. The dialogues are elicited using a picture replication task that requires active cooperation and interaction of speakers by asking them to produce a drawing as close to the original as possible. The corpus is appropriate for the study of interactional features and speech reduction phenomena across native and second languages. The combination of productions in non-native English and in speakers’ native language is advantageous for investigation of L2 issues while providing a L1 behaviour reference from all the speakers. The corpus consists of 20 dialogues comprising 12 hours 53 minutes of recording, and was collected in 2008. Preparation of the transcriptions, including a manual orthographic transcription and an automatically generated phonetic transcription, is currently in progress. The phonetic transcriptions are automatically generated by aligning acoustic models with the speech signal on the basis of the orthographic transcriptions and a dictionary of pronunciation variants compiled for the relevant language. Upon completion the corpus will be made available via the European Language Resources Association (ELRA).