LINGUISTIC STATISTICS

The work demonstrates the methods and techniques of elimination of variation of linguistic units in the transcriptions of the medieval Slavonic manuscripts of the historical corpus “Manuscript” (manuscripts.ru). The textual corpus, the material of which is presented by the machine-readable copies which resemble the original most closely, provides the user with such tools of transformation (modification) of linguistic units which enable the creation of queries and getting of retrievals corresponding to the task to be solved. In case of an inexact search the user has the possiblity to delete titlos and diacritics, reduction of the versions of letters to their basic form, indication of the mask of the linguistic units being searched in the form of a regular expression, use of the letters of the contemporary Cyrillic alphabet. To ensure operations over lemmas by means of the statistic modules of the corpus, it is necessary to automatically assign a given textual form to exactly one lemma. Due to grammatical homonymy, incorrect lemmatization would result in a situation where quantitative data based on word forms and data based on lemmas do not match each other. In order to assign word forms to the correct lemma, we apply a rule-based approach, taking into account the formal and quantitative characteristics of the linguistic units (such as their morphological variation or invariation, their frequency in the sub-corpus, the matching or mismatching with the lemma form, the frequency of relationships between the textual forms and dictionary paradigms of variable words, the results of manual elimination of the homonymy). The reduction of textual forms to unified, normalized, transliterated or initial forms is a necessary procedure for extracting of data from the historical corpus for the distributive-statistical analysis of the semantics of linguistic units.

Subject: Digital humanities

Keywords: historical corpus search and demonstration of data LINGUISTIC STATISTICS

The requirements for historical corpora of medieval texts 1) are determined by properties of the data and the historical-linguistic, textological and linguo-textological tasks to be solved; 2) and should be realized with the help of special tagging, processing procedures, query parameters and retrieval demonstrations. The corpus should a) have metadata concerning both texts and manuscripts, and involving both linguistic and analytical tagging; b) support the rendering of documents (facsimile and transcription), concordances, lists, and comparison of subcorpora data; c) simplify graphic-orthographic variation during data search and visualization; d) provide tools both for processing and searching linguistic material and its further analysis according to traditional methods; and e) support problem description and resolution by applying corpus methods that engage with the quantity, distribution, co-occurrence, and variation of linguistic units in big data arrays. The realization of these requirements is demonstrated on a subcorpus of three copies of chronicles (Laurentian, Hypatian, Radzivilovsky) from the historical corpus project “Manuscript” (manuscripts.ru).

Subject: Language and Literature Studies Language studies Studies of Literature Philology Theory of Literature Theoretical Linguistics Applied Linguistics

Keywords: HISTORICAL SLAVONIC CORPUS RUSSIAN CHRONICLES LINGUISTIC STATISTICS