RNC News

The Word Portrait functionality in the main corpus has been improved and expanded:

The new Sketches section allows the user to understand how a word interacts with other words in the language. This interaction is defined through the compatibility (collocations) with words of different parts of speech. This takes into account the various syntactic functions of a word in a sentence, which cover the main domains where a given word “works” in the language. One can search what respect is like in Russian and what one may make with it. Another query explores the compatibility of the word bring in Russian. Whereas one usually brings some abstract notions (as far as the texts show us), the most frequent subjects of bringing are quite material.
For nouns, adjectives, verbs, and adverbs, up to 10 of the most closely related words in each sketch are displayed. For other parts of speech, the sketches are not shown.

The Similar Words section now uses its own model to search for semantic associates, trained on actual texts from the main corpus of the RNC. The new model allowed us to reduce the number of errors. But due to the fact that the selection of similar words is fully automatic, errors (e.g. non-existent word forms) can still occur.