Slavic Corpus and Computational Linguistics

In this paper we focus on corpus-linguistic studies that address theoretical questions and on computational linguistic work on corpus annotation that makes corpora useful for linguistic analysis. First we discuss why the corpus linguistic approach was discredited by generative linguists in the second half of the 20th century, how it made a comeback through advances in computing and was finally adopted by usage-based linguistics at the beginning of the 21st century. Then we move on to an overview of necessary and common annotation layers and the issues that are encountered when performing automatic annotation, with special emphasis on Slavic languages. Finally we survey the types of research requiring corpora that Slavic linguists are involved in worldwide, and the resources they have at their disposal.