The Russian National Corpus is a representative collection of texts in Russian, counting more than 2 bln tokens and completed with linguistic annotation and search tools

On April 18, Svetlana Savchuk, a leading researcher at the Department of Corpus Linguistics and Linguistic Poetics and Director of the Non-Profit Organization “National Corpus of the Russian Language”, celebrates her anniversary.

Svetlana is one of the pioneers of corpus linguistics in Russia. It is no coincidence that she joined the Russian National Corpus team from the very beginning, becoming one of its founders and key driving forces. She is a unique expert in media, spoken, and multimedia corpora, and she continues to develop new multimedia projects while mentoring students. It is hard to imagine the day-to-day work of the Corpus without Svetlana’s wide-ranging organizational support. Among her major initiatives is the annual conference devoted to the study of oral speech and sign language (the Grishina Readings). For many years, she has helped maintain the thematic, stylistic, and genre balance of the Main Corpus, and more recently she has been bringing this expertise into modern neural annotation systems.

Svetlana is the heart of the National Corpus: an exceptionally competent, generous, and reliable colleague. The role she plays in our lives can be compared to the “magical helper” of fairy tales (a scientific term!). With Svetlana around, our everyday work truly does become a little more like a fairy tale. We warmly congratulate Svetlana on her anniversary and wish her good health, the fulfillment of all her creative plans, and many new and inspiring discoveries.

We continue to develop the functionality of the corpus for teaching Russian in schools. Six new rules related to vowel alternation in the root have been added to the Practice Example Generator:

• The letters А and О in root -зар-/-зор-
• The letters А and О in root -кас-/-кос(н)-
• The letters А and О in root -мак-/-мок-
• The letters А and О in root -плав-/-плов-/-плы(в)-
• The letters А and О in root -рав-/-ров-
• The letters А and О in root -твар-/-твор-

You can access the generator page from the RNC for school page by clicking on the corresponding banner.

The Social Media corpus database has been expanded with a new collection of texts from regional online sources in Astrakhan, Vologda, Leningrad, and Sakhalin Oblasts, as well as Karelia and Mordovia Republics, covering the period from 2005 to 2023. The additions include posts by bloggers, discussions in local online communities, and content from regional groups on platforms such as VK, Telegram, LiveJournal, Zen, and others. The collection was prepared with the participation of staff from Voronezh State University. The update totals 5 million tokens.