Bulgarian National Corpus Project and its Аpplications

for Scientific and Educational Purposes

Svetla Koeva, Diana Blagoeva, Sija Kolkovska

Abstract

The paper presents Bulgarian National Corpus project (BulNC) – a large-scale, representative, online available corpus of Bulgarian. The BulNC is also a monolingual general corpus, fully morpho-syntactically (and partially semantically) annotated, and manually provided with detailed meta-data descriptions. Presently the Bulgarian National corpus consists of about 320 000 000 graphical words and includes more than 10 000 samples. Briefly the corpus structure and the accepted criteria for representativeness and well-balancing are presented. The query language for advance search of collocations and concordances is demonstrated with some examples. The Bulgarian National Corpus enables a number of applications in various areas of linguistics: in lexicography; in computational linguistics; within theoretical studies of specific linguistic phenomena; for extracting example sentences for teaching Bulgarian, etc.