The aim of the paper is to present recent ― as of March 2010 ― developments in the construction of the National Corpus of Polish (NKJP). The NKJP project was launched at the very end of 2007 and it is aimed at compiling a large, linguistically annotated corpus of contemporary Polish by the end of 2010. Out of the total pool of 1 billion words of text data collected in the project, a 300 million word balanced corpus will be selected to match a set of predefined representativeness criteria. This present paper outlines a number of recent developments in the NKJP project, including: 1) the design of text encoding XML schemata for various levels of linguistic information, 2) a new tool for manual annotation at various levels, 3) numerous improvements in search tools. As the work on NKJP progresses, it becomes clear that this project serves as an important testbed for linguistic annotation and interoperability standards. We believe that our recent experiences will prove relevant to future large-scale language resource compilation efforts.

This paper presents a new corpus project, aiming at building a national corpus of Polish. What makes it different from a typical YACP (Yet Another Corpus Project) is 1) the fact that all four partners in the project have in the past constructed corpora of Polish, sometimes in the spirit of collaboration, at other times - in the spirit of competition, 2) the partners bring into the project varying areas of expertise and experience, so the synergy effect is anticipated, 3) the corpus will be built with an eye on specific applications in various fields, including lexicography (the corpus will be the empirical basis of a new large general dictionary of Polish) and natural language processing (a number of NLP tools will be constructed within the project).