The paper overviews the SYN series of synchronic corpora of written Czech compiled within the framework of the Czech National Corpus project. It describes their design and processing with a focus on the annotation, i.e. lemmatization and morphological tagging.
The paper also introduces SYN2013PUB, a new 935-million newspaper corpus of Czech published in 2013 as the most recent addition to the SYN series before planned revision of its architecture. SYN2013PUB can be seen as a completion of the series in terms of titles and publication dates of major Czech newspapers that are now covered by complete volumes in comparable proportions.
All SYN-series corpora can be characterized as traditional, with emphasis on cleared copyright issues, well-defined composition, reliable metadata and high-quality data processing; their overall size currently exceeds 2.2 billion running words.