?
Russian challenges for quantitative research
The Russian language, despite being one of the most studied in the world, until recently has been little explored quantitatively. After a burst of research activity in the years 1960–1980, quantitative studies of Russian vanished. They are now reappearing in an entirely different context. Today, we have large and deeply annotated corpora available for extended quantitative research, such as the Rus- sian National Corpus, ruWac, ruTenTen, to name just a few (websites for these and other resources will be found in a special section in the References). The present volume is intended to fill the lacuna between the available data and the methods that can be applied to studying them.
Our goal is to present current trends in researching Russian quantitative linguis- tics, to evaluate the research methods vis-à-vis Russian data, and to show both the advantages and the disadvantages of the methods. We especially encouraged our authors to focus on evaluating statistical methods and new models of analysis. New findings concern applicability, evaluation, and the challenges that arise from using quantitative approaches to Russian data. The goal of this volume is therefore twofold: a) to address the topic of quantitative analysis of the Russian language, and b) to present an evaluation of methods applied to Russian data.
