The Polish Sejm Corpus

This document presents the first edition of the Polish Sejm Corpus -- a new specialized resource containing transcribed, automatically annotated utterances of the Members of Polish Sejm (lower chamber of the Polish Parliament). The corpus data encoding is inherited from the National Corpus of Polish and enhanced with session metadata and structure. The multi-layered stand-off annotation contains sentence- and token-level segmentation, disambiguated morphosyntactic information, syntactic words and groups resulting from shallow parsing and named entities. The paper also outlines several novel ideas for corpus preparation, e.g. the notion of a live corpus, constantly populated with new data or the concept of linking corpus data with external databases to enrich content. Although initial statistical comparison of the resource with the balanced corpus of general Polish reveals substantial differences in language richness, the resource makes a valuable source of linguistic information as a large (300 M segments) collection of quasi-spoken data ready to be aligned with the audio/video recording of sessions, currently being made publicly available by Sejm.