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Corpus of Russian student texts: design and prospects
The Corpus of Russian Student Texts (CoRST) is a computational and research project started in 2013 at the Linguistic Laboratory for Corpora Research Technologies at HSE. It comprises a collection of Russian texts written by students from various Russian universities. Its main research goal is to examine language deviations viewed as markers of language change. CoRST is supplied with metalinguistic, morphological and error annotation that enable to customize subcorpora and search by various error types. Its error annotation is based on the modular classification: lexis, grammar and discourse, within which most frequent error phenomena are further distinguished. In total, the error classification encompasses 39 (20 higher-level and 19 lower-level) error tags. The crucial characteristic of CoRST is that the error annotation is multi-layered. Typically, since an error section can be corrected in a few ways, it is annotated with a few error tags respectively. Moreover, the corpus provides search by two possible explanation factors – typo and construction blending. The perspectives of CoRST development have both computational and research aspects, including qualitative and statistical comparative analysis of language phenomena in CoRST and NRC.