Collocations in Russian Lexicography and Russian Collocations Database

Proceedings of the 12th Conference on Language Resources and Evaluation (LREC 2020), pages 3198–3206 Marseille, 11–16 May 2020 c⃝ European Language Resources Association (ELRA), licensed under CC-BY-NC 3198 Collocations in Russian Lexicography and Russian Collocations Database Maria Khokhlova St Petersburg State University Universitetskaya emb., 11, 199034 St. Petersburg, Russia m.khokhlova@spbu.ru Abstract The paper presents the issue of collocability and collocations in Russian and gives a survey of a wide range of dictionaries both printed and online ones that describe collocations. Our project deals with building a database that will include dictionary and statistical collocations. The former can be described in various lexicographic resources whereas the latter can be extracted automatically from corpora. Dictionaries differ among themselves, the information is given in various ways, making it hard for language learners and researchers to acquire data. A number of dictionaries were analyzed and processed to retrieve verified collocations, however the overlap between the lists of collocations extracted from them is still rather small. This fact indicates there is a need to create a unified resource which takes into account collocability and more examples. The proposed resource will also be useful for linguists and for studying Russian as a foreign language. The obtained results can be important for machine learning and for other NLP tasks, for instance, automatic clustering of word combinations and disambiguation. Keywords: collocations, Russian dictionaries, lexical database 1. Introduction The study of collocability has not lost its relevance over the past decades. The identification of lexical constructions and their further analysis are crucial for various issues in modern applied linguistics: creating dictionaries for sentiment analysis, search queries expansion, machine translation, language learning etc. A powerful surge of interest to collecting and analyzing data about joint occurrence of lexical units can be explained by the increased role of corpus linguistics in recent years, in which the study of set expressions is associated both with the solution of applied problems and with the theoretical interpretation of the acquired material. Existing methods for collocation extraction cannot be considered perfect, because, firstly, they distinguish phrases of a different nature, and secondly, there is not enough data to evaluate them. The latter fact is the reason that there is a need in a variety of dictionaries and other resources which will reflect verified collocations for the subsequent verification of data obtained automatically. This was the motivation of our project on building a database of Russian collocations that will comprise both dictionary and empirical collocations, i.e. ones extracted from lexicographic resources and corpora (Khokhlova, 2018). The paper focuses on giving a survey of different dictionaries and online systems for Russian that can be used for compiling an integrated database. A movement from printed dictionaries to electronic ones accessible via web, desktop or mobile applications was a basic trend of lexicography within the last decades. Russian dictionaries have a long tradition but when it comes to computational lexicography it is long overdue. It can be partially explained by the historical events of the Soviet and post-Soviet era …

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