What is a corpus?

A language corpus is a collection of texts in that language which has been enriched with additional linguistic information, called annotation, and, preferably, equipped with a search engine. Here you will find a short list of frequently asked questions about the Komi-Zyrian corpora.

— Who needs corpora?

First of all, corpora are used by linguists. The search engine and annotation of corpora are designed in such a way that you can make linguistic queries such as “find all nouns in the genitive case” or “find all forms of the word кань followed by a verb”. Apart from linguists, corpus can be a useful tool for language teachers, language learners, and even the native speakers.

— Can I use the corpus as a library?

No, these corpora are not designed for that. When you work with a corpus, you make a query, i.e. search for a particular word, phrase or construction, and get back all sentences that contain what you searched for. By default, the sentences are showed in random order. You can expand the context of each of the sentences you get, i.e. look at their neighboring sentences. However, you may do so only a limited number of times for each sentence. Therefore, it is impossible to read an entire text in the corpus. This is done for copyright protection.

— Can I use the corpus as a dictionary?

Each Komi-Zyrian word in the corpus has Russian translation (no English translations are available at the moment). However, they are only provided as auxiliary information for users who do not speak Komi. The translations in the corpus are kept short and simple by design, they do not list all senses and do not provide usage examples like real dictionaries. If you want to know how to translate a word, the right way to do so is consulting a dictionary.

— What is morphological annotation and how do you get it?

The corpora located here are lemmatized and morphologically annotated. Lemmatization means that each word in the texts is annotated with its lemma, i.e. dictionary/citation form. Morphological annotation means that each word is annotated for its grammatical features, such as part of speech, number, case, tense, etc. Since the corpora in question are too large for manual annotation to be feasible, they were annotated automatically with a program called morphological analyzer. The analyzer uses a manually compiled grammatical dictionary and a formalized description of Komi-Zyrian inflection. The analyzer together with the necessary materials is freely available in my bitbucket repository. Automatic annotation unfortunately means that, first, out-of-vocabulary words are not annotated, and, second, that some words have several ambiguous analyses. For example, confronted with the form воӧ, the analyzer cannot determine whether it should be analyzed as the 1sg possessive form of во (“my year”), illative form of the same word (“in a year”) or even a form of the verb воны “come”. Russian sentences in the social media corpus were annotated with the mystem analyzer.

Komi language

Komi-Zyrian is one of the two literary standards for the dialectal continuum known as Komi, which belong to the Permic group of the Uralic family, along with Udmurt. The number of Komi-Zyrian speakers is estimated at 150,000. Komi-Zyrian uses Cyrillic orthography based on the Russian alphabet, with two additional letters. Almost all morphological markers are suffixes that mostly attach to the stem agglutinatively. Nominal grammatical categories are number, case, and possessiveness. The direct object can be marked either in the nominative or in the accusative (DOM). The word order in the sentence is free, with SVO (subject – verb – object) being the default.

Tagset

The grammatical features of the words in the corpora are marked with short tags. Here is the full list of tags used in Komi-Zyrian corpora. Both corpora have identical set of tags.

• A — adjective
• APRO — adjectival pronoun
• ADV — adverb
• ADVPRO — adverbial pronoun
• CONJ — conjunction
• IMIT — ideophone
• INTRJ — interjection
• N — noun
• NUM — numeral
• PARENTH — parenthetic word
• PART — particle
• PN — proper noun (subtype of nouns)
• POST — postposition
• PREDIC — predicative
• PRO — pronoun
• V — verb
• 1 — 1st person
• 1pl — 1pl possessive suffix
• 1sg — 1sg possessive suffix
• 2 — 2nd person
• 2pl — 2pl possessive suffix
• 2sg — 2sg possessive suffix
• 3 — 3rd person
• 3pl — 3pl possessive suffix
• 3sg — 3sg possessive suffix
• abbr — abbreviation
• abl — ablative case
• acc — accusative case
• anim — animate noun
• app — approximative case
• atten — attenuative derivation (-i̮št-)
• attr — any attributive
• attr_a — general attributive in -a
• attr_loc — locative attributive in -sa
• body — body part
• car — caritive case
• card — cardinal number
• case_comp — case compounding
• caus — causative (-əd-)
• cns — consecutive case in -la
• coll — collective numeral
• com — comitative
• comp — comparative (-ǯi̮k)
• cvb.gen — general converb (-ig)
• cvb.lim — limitative converb (-təǯ́)
• cvb.mon — converb in -mən
• cvb.neg — negative converb (-təg)
• cvb.sim — converb of simultaneity (-əmən)
• dat — dative case
• delim — delimitative derivation (-l-)
• dem — demonstrative pronoun
• distr — distributive numeral
• egr — egressive case
• el — elative case
• famn — family name
• fut — future tense
• gen — genitive case
• hum — human
• ill — illative case
• imp — imperative
• impers — impersonal verb (annotation incomplete)
• indef — indefinite pronoun
• inf — infinitive
• ins — instrumental case
• intr — intransitive verb (annotation incomplete)
• iter — iterative (-av-)
• loc — locative/inessive
• missp — typo
• neg — negative form
• neg_attr — negative attributive
• nmlz — nominalization in -əm
• nmlz_in — locative nominalization in -in
• nmlz_lun — abstract noun in -lun
• nmlz_tor — abstract noun in -tor
• nom — nominative case
• oblin — oblinative (adjective in -əś)
• ord — ordinal number
• pass — passive
• pass_sjy — passive (-śi̮-)
• pass_ysj — passive (-i̮ś-)
• patrn — patronymic
• period — numeral in -pərjə
• pers — peronal pronoun
• persn — personal (given) name
• pl — plural
• pr — case in -śa
• prol — prolative case
• prs — present tense
• pst — first (direct) past tense
• pst2 — second (evidential) past tense
• ptcp.act — active participle
• ptcp.neg — negative participle
• refl — reflective pronoun
• rel_adj — relational adjective
• rel_n — relational noun (inflected postposition)
• rus — Russian borrowing (or borrowing through Russian)
• rus_afx — Russian affix with native stem
• sg — singular
• short — short form of a personal pronoun
• supernat — noun that denotes a supernatural beingThis category is a byproduct of animacy/humanness annotation. Since it is not clear whether these cases should be classified as human, we put them in a separate box, so that the user can decide that for themselves.
• term — terminative case
• time_meas — time measurement unit
• tr — transitive verb (annotation incomplete)
• topn — toponym (geographical name)
• transport — transport
• vn — verbal noun in -an

The tagset for the Russian-language part (Russian sentences in the social media corpus) can be found in the Russian National Corpus.

Authors

The corpora and morphological analyzer are developed and maintained by Timofey Arkhangelskiy. The first versions of the corpora were released in 2019 as part of his postdoctoral project supported by Alexander von Humboldt Foundation. The corpora are hosted by the School of linguistics at HSE, Moscow.