Structure and Usage of the Tartu University Corpus of Written Estonian

This paper provides an overview of the first computer corpus of the Estonian language compiled at the University of Tartu. It was based on the design principles of the LOB and Brown corpora. The main part of the corpus was assembled from 1991-1995 and contains about 1 million textual words. It was compiled by an interdepartmental computational linguistics research group of the university. This paper gives a survey of the text groups in the corpus and of the problems the compilers had to solve together with the proposed solutions and outlines the main differences from the model corpora and the underlying reasons for them. These are followed by a review of the available computer routines for processing the corpus.