A Corpus-Driven Learner Dictionary of Collocations Russian Verbs

The paper describes the process of creating a web resource about some Russian verb collocations, which would be a helpful tool for people studying Russian as a foreign language. The working title of the resource is Verba. The resource was created in several stages. First, there had to be made a decision about how many words should be included in the dictionary and what kind of criteria this choice should be based on. A small statistic research was conducted on seven different learner dictionaries and a frequency dictionary of Russian. As a result of this research, some criteria were developed, which were later used to collect a list of 1163 words to be included in the dictionary. The next task was about deciding what exact kind of information the dictionary should contain and how it should be presented. The dictionary was based on FrameBank, a resource with the same topic and different target audience: FrameBank is targeted on people doing linguistic science. In order to adapt FrameBank articles for the target audience of our dicitonary, they were reorganized and enriched with examples from bi- and monolingual corpora. Finally, having all the necessary linguistic data extracted, we need to create an interface, which would meet the needs of its target audience, a minimalistic and intuitively understandable interface. We suppose that this is what the interface is like at the moment. The resource in question can already be of a great help for foreign students studying Russian. It is not perfect, there are a number of weaknesses and shortcomings. Nonetheless, it can be confidently said that the original goal of the work described in the paper has been achieved.