The Russian National Corpus (English official name; the Russian name is Национальный корпус русского языка, lit. National Corpus of Russian language, but as the official English variant the Russian National Corpus is used) is a corpus of Russian language that has been available online since April 29, 2004. It is being created by the Institute of Russian language, Russian Academy of Sciences.
It currently contains about 150 million word forms that are automatically lemmatized and POS-/grammeme-tagged, i. e. all the possible morphological analyses for each orthographic form are ascribed to it. Lemmata, POS, grammatical items and their combinations are searchable. Additionally, 6 million word forms are in the subcorpus with manually resolved homonymy.
The subcorpus with resolved morphological homonymy is also automatically accentuated. The whole corpus has a searchable tagging concerning lexical semantics (LS), including morphosemantic POS subclasses (proper noun, reflexive pronoun etc.), LS characteristics proper (thematic class, causativity, evaluation), derivation (diminutive, adverb formed from adjective etc.).
The RNC includes also the following subcorpora:
- a treebank of syntactical dependencies (largely based on the Igor Mel'čuk's Meaning-Text Theory)
- an English<=>Russian and German=>Russian parallel corpora;
- a corpus of Russian poetry, where the rhyming words and poetic prosody (including meter, stanzas etc.) is additionally tagged;
- a corpus of Russian dialects with specific dialect grammar tagging;
- a corpus showing the history of Russian stress
- an educational subcorpus reflecting school standards.
All the texts have tags bearing metatextual information - the author, his/her birth date, creation date, text size, text genres (general fiction, detective story, newspaper article etc.); all these categories are browsable and searchable separately. It is possible to define a user's subcorpus to search lemmata/POS-grammeme/semantic tags combinations only within this subset.
The corpus will be made available off-line and distributed for non-commercial purposes, but currently due to some technical and/or copyright problems it is accessible only on-line.