RuSkELL: Online Language Learning Tool for Russian Language

RuSkELL ("Russian + Sketch Engine for Language Learning") is a new online resource intended for researchers and learners of Russian. It incorporates a specially pre-processed corpus and the interface which allows users to search for phrases in sentences, extract salient collocates and show similar words. The tool builds upon its English counterpart SkELL (Baisa & Suchomel 2014). The aim of the project is to adapt the existing SkELL tool to Russian, improve its performance and make it user-friendly to Russian users. The existing problems include errors in query output and insufficiently transparent interface. The project aspires to solve them by 1) modifying Sketch grammar rules to exclude irrelevant output and to add informative collocations unaccounted for in the existing Sketch grammar; 2) providing collocation groups with easy-to-understand labels in Russian. We describe the process of building the language data and problems we need to address to accommodate the tool for the specificities of the Russian language.