Belarusian N-korpus: Towards a Belarusian National Corpus

Abstract

The article examines the current state of the Belarusian N-korpus: its structure, including the range, quality and balance of texts, the type of annotation, data availability, user interface construction, functions available in the search engine as well as documentation for given data. The goal is to answer the question whether Belarusian N-korpus may become the National Corpus. The article argues that even though there are obvious flaws in the discussed resource, it should become the best database of the Belarusian language in a matter of a few years.