Preface to Version 1.0

We are pleased to publish the first version of the manual for morphological annotation of Czech sentences. We believe that such guidelines can be of use to the users of Prague Dependency Treebank 1.0 (PDT 1.0), as well as for preparation of new data.

Let us recall the most important steps we passed in order to get about two million morphologically annotated words (PDT 1.0). At the very beginning, we put together a team of eight annotators - we did introduce them to a system of morphological tags we designed to describe Czech morphological properties; we also used (as a preprocessing step) a morphological analyzer for processing isolated words, and, last but not least, we did rely on their knowledge of Czech morphology they have acquired while studying at secondary school, i.e. we did not offer them any annotation guidelines.

One can assume that this strategy is too hazardous - how to deal with discrepancies the annotators produce to ensure the consistency of annotation? First, two annotators annotated each text file. Then, by a "blind" automatic procedure (no matter what word is processed - just comparing two strings) we detected words annotated differently. Consequently, the only one annotator (as a member of just two-member team) handled these cases and, also, checked the morphological annotations against the syntactic-analytic annotations. This way we replaced the absence of annotation guidelines by sequential elimination of discrepancies across both the morphological and syntactic-analytic levels of annotation.

Along the way we were writing this annotation manual. It is not intended as a comprehensive guide to the morphological annotation of Czech sentences (in contrast to the manual for syntactic-analytic annotations). The authors concentrate "only" on those cases which caused the most ambiguities and problems while annotating PDT 1.0. The ongoing effort is directed to the treating of not- yet-solved problematic cases in accord with the conventions of the automatic morphological analyzer.

The morphological annotation of PDT 1.0 was carried out in the framework of experimental verification of the definition of formal representation of the analysis of Czech sentences (the project GAČR 405/96/0198, "Formal representation of language structures"). The material obtained in this way (data) is used in many domains of research in computational linguistics, above all as basic (training) data in projects of the automatic language analysis, the MŠMT research project MSM113000006, the "Laboratory for Language Data Processing" (the MŠMT project VS961510) and the Center for Computational Linguistics (the MŠMT project LN00A063). These data have been also used as verification material for various partial projects within the complex program GAČR 405/96/K214 ("Czech Language in Computer Age"). The "Center for Computational Linguistics" project financially supported work on these morphological annotation guidelines.