The Slovak National Corpus Department, a specialized unit of the SAS Ľ. Štúr Institute of Linguistics (JÚĽŠ SAS), was legally established by the Resolution of the Government of the Slovak Republic no. 137 of 13 February 2002, which, on the initiative of the Ministry of Culture of the Slovak Republic and with the financial support of the Ministry of Education of the Slovak Republic and the Board of the Slovak Academy of Sciences, approved the Project of Building the National Corpus of the Slovak Language and Digitisation of Linguistic Research in 2002–2006.
Several factors proved decisive for the establishment of this unit within the JÚĽŠ SAS, especially the local lexicographic tradition, including the building and use of material resources to describe individual forms of the Slovak language, as well as the preparation of a new comprehensive Dictionary of the current Slovak language. None the least important was the experience of the Institute staff, mainly due to their participation in the grant project Methodology of Building the Corpus of Texts and the Database of the Slovak Language in 1991–1993. Crucial for the existence and development of the department is the continuous support from the SAS Board, from the Ministry of Culture of the Slovak Republic and the Ministry of Education, Science, Research and Sport of the Slovak Republic. Currently under way is already the 5th stage of the project titled Building and Development of the Slovak National Corpus (2022–2026).
The core activities of the department, the outputs of which have become an integral material basis of linguistic as well as broader research in humanities in Slovakia, consist of building the Slovak language corpus databases and the simultaneous development and continuous improvement of the relevant software tools. In addition to natural language processing and corpus linguistics, the department staff are also involved partially in the issues of terminology and digital humanities.
