Moksha corpora


Welcome to the start page of Moksha language corpora: the Main corpus of literary Moksha (contains mostly press) and the Corpus of Moksha-language social media.

Details To the main corpus To the social media corpus

Moksha corpora

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This is the main page of the website where linguistic corpora of Moksha language are located. Currently, two corpora are available: the corpus of contemporary written literary Moksha (“the Main corpus”) and the corpus of Moksha-language social media and forums. They differ in what kind of texts the contain, but have mostly identical annotation and search capabilities. Here is a brief comparison:

Main corpus Social media corpus
Language Moksha Moksha and Russian
Size 1.74 million words 14 thousand words (the Moksha part)
166 thousand words (the Russian part)
Texts contemporary press (up to November 2018) — 86.4%%; translation of the New Testament — 8.9%; 20th century fiction — 0.8%; blogs — 0.7% open posts and comments by Moksha-speaking vkontakte users (up to December 2018)
Language variety in most cases, standard written literary Moksha or close to it language of digital communication: closer to the spoken variety, influenced by the dialects and Russian language, contains numerous code switching instances
Annotation
  • automatic morphological annotation (lemmatization, part of speech, all inflectional features), 91% words analyzedonly tokens that do not contain digits or Latin characters are taken into account
  • no disambiguation
  • annotation of Russian loanwords
  • annotation of several lexical/semantic classes: animate/human nouns, body parts, transport, different classes of proper names, diminutives
  • glossing
  • Russian translation of lemmata
  • automatic morphological annotation (lemmatization, part of speech, all inflectional features), 79% words analyzedonly tokens that do not contain digits or Latin characters are taken into account
  • no disambiguation
  • annotation of Russian loanwords
  • annotation of several lexical/semantic classes: animate/human nouns, body parts, transport, different classes of proper names, diminutives
  • glossing
  • Russian translation of lemmata
Metadata
  • title of the text
  • author or title of the newspaper
  • creation year (exact date in the case of newspapers)
  • genre
  • group name (for groups)
  • publicly available user metadata: sex (for everyone); if available, also birth year (grouped in 5-year spans); real names and nicknames of the users are hidden
  • creation year
  • message type (post/comment)
  • language (tagged automatically, independently for each sentence)

Apart from the corpora available here, there exists another publicly available Moksha corpus developed by Jack Rueter. It contains 800 thousand tokens of fiction, but has no morphological annotation.

You can find more detailed information about Moksha Social media corpus and its development in this paper. Please consider citing this paper if your research is based on this corpus:

Timofey Arkhangelskiy. 2019. Corpora of social media in minority Uralic languages. Proceedings of the fifth Workshop on Computational Linguistics for Uralic Languages, pages 125–140, Tartu, Estonia, January 7 - January 8, 2019.

What is a corpus?

A language corpus is a collection of texts in that language which has been enriched with additional linguistic information, called annotation, and, preferably, equipped with a search engine. Here you will find a short list of frequently asked questions about the Moksha corpora.

— Who needs corpora?

First of all, corpora are used by linguists. The search engine and annotation of corpora are designed in such a way that you can make linguistic queries such as “find all nouns in the genitive case” or “find all forms of the word тядя followed by a verb”. Apart from linguists, corpus can be a useful tool for language teachers, language learners, and even the native speakers.

— Can I use the corpus as a library?

No, these corpora are not designed for that. When you work with a corpus, you make a query, i.e. search for a particular word, phrase or construction, and get back all sentences that contain what you searched for. By default, the sentences are showed in random order. You can expand the context of each of the sentences you get, i.e. look at their neighboring sentences. However, you may do so only a limited number of times for each sentence. Therefore, it is impossible to read an entire text in the corpus. This is done for copyright protection.

— Can I use the corpus as a dictionary?

Each Moksha word in the corpus has Russian translation (no English translations are available at the moment). However, they are only provided as auxiliary information for users who do not speak Moksha. The translations in the corpus are kept short and simple by design, they do not list all senses and do not provide usage examples like real dictionaries. If you want to know how to translate a word, the right way to do so is consulting a dictionary.

— What is morphological annotation and how do you get it?

The corpora located here are lemmatized and morphologically annotated. Lemmatization means that each word in the texts is annotated with its lemma, i.e. dictionary/citation form. Morphological annotation means that each word is annotated for its grammatical features, such as part of speech, number, case, tense, etc. Since the corpora in question are too large for manual annotation to be feasible, they were annotated automatically with a program called morphological analyzer. The analyzer uses a manually compiled grammatical dictionary and a formalized description of Moksha inflection. The analyzer together with the necessary materials is freely available in my bitbucket repository. Automatic annotation unfortunately means that, first, out-of-vocabulary words are not annotated, and, second, that some words have several ambiguous analyses. For example, confronted with the form валда, the analyzer cannot determine whether it should be analyzed as the citation form of of валда (“bright”) or the ablative of the word вал (“about a word”). Russian sentences in the social media corpus were annotated with the mystem analyzer.

Moksha language

Moksha is one of the two Mordvinic languages, which belong to the Uralic family. The number of speakers is unknown due to the fact that in the censuses, most Erzya and Moksha speakers indicate “Mordvin” as their language; it can be very roughly estimated at 200,000. Moksha uses Cyrillic orthography based on the Russian alphabet. All morphological markers are suffixes that mostly attach to the stem agglutinatively. Nominal grammatical categories are number, case, definiteness and possessiveness. Transitive verbs can index person and number of the subject and the direct object. The direct object can be marked either in the nominative or in the genitive (DOM). The word order in the sentence is free, with SVO (subject – verb – object) being the default.

Tagset

The grammatical features of the words in the corpora are marked with short tags. Here is the full list of tags used in Moksha corpora. Both corpora have identical set of tags.

  • A — adjective
  • APRO — adjectival pronoun
  • ADV — adverb
  • ADVPRO — adverbial pronoun
  • CONJ — conjunction
  • IMIT — ideophone
  • INTRJ — interjection
  • N — noun
  • NUM — numeral
  • PARENTH — parenthetic word
  • PART — particle
  • PN — proper noun (subtype of nouns)
  • POST — postposition
  • PREDIC — predicative
  • PRO — pronoun
  • V — verb
  • 1.o — 1st person of the object
  • 1.s — 1st person of the subject
  • 1pl — 1st person plural possessive
  • 1sg — 1st person singular possessive
  • 2.o — 2nd person of the object
  • 2.s — 2nd person of the subject
  • 2pl — 2nd person plural possessive
  • 2sg — 2nd person singular possessive
  • 3.o — 3rd person of the object
  • 3.s — 3rd person of the subject
  • 3pl — 3rd person plural possessive
  • 3sg — 3rd person singular possessive
  • abbr — abbreviation
  • abl — ablative
  • add — additive clitic
  • all — allative
  • anim — animate noun
  • body — body part
  • car — caritive
  • case_comp — case compounding
  • caus — causative (-vt-)
  • coll — collective numeral
  • com — comitative (unproductive)
  • comp — comparative
  • cond — conditional mood
  • csl — causal case
  • cvb.sim — converb of simultaneity (-mok)
  • dat — dative
  • def — definite declension
  • desid — desiderative mood
  • dim — diminutive
  • distr — distributive numeral
  • el — elative
  • famn — family name
  • gen — genitive
  • hum — human
  • ill — illative
  • imp — imperative
  • inch — inchoative (-źev-)
  • inf — infinitive (-ms)
  • iter — iterative (-kšn-, -nd-, -šend-)
  • loc — locative/inessive
  • missp — typo
  • mult — multiplicative (-ńe-, -śe-)
  • neg — negative form
  • nmlz — nominalization
  • nmlz_ma — nominalization in -ma
  • nmlz_mka — nominalization in -mka
  • nom — nominative
  • non_obj — objectless conjugation
  • npst — non-past tense
  • num_approx — approximative numeral
  • opt — optative mood
  • ord — ordinal numeral
  • pair — pair numeral
  • pass — passive (-v-)
  • patrn — patronymic
  • persn — personal (given) name
  • pl — plural
  • pl.o — plural object
  • pl.s — plural subject
  • pl_comp — plural in case compounding
  • prol — prolative
  • pst — first past tense
  • pst2 — second past tense
  • ptcp.prs.pass — present passive participle
  • ptcp.pst — past participle
  • rel_n — relational noun (inflected postposition)
  • rus — Russian borrowing (or borrowing through Russian)
  • sg — singular
  • sg.o — singular object
  • sg.s — singular subject
  • subj — subjunctive mood
  • supernat — noun that denotes a supernatural beingThis category is a byproduct of animacy/humanness annotation. Since it is not clear whether these cases should be classified as human, we put them in a separate box, so that the user can decide that for themselves.
  • temp — temporal case (-ńa; unproductive)
  • time_meas — time measurement unit
  • topn — toponym (geographical name)
  • trans — translative
  • transport — transport

The tagset for the Russian-language part (Russian sentences in the social media corpus) can be found in the Russian National Corpus.

Authors

The corpora and morphological analyzer are developed and maintained by Timofey Arkhangelskiy. The first versions of the corpora were released in 2018 as part of his postdoctoral project supported by Alexander von Humboldt Foundation. The background picture was kindly provided by Polina Pleshak. The corpora are hosted by the School of linguistics at HSE, Moscow.

Contacts


If you have questions, would like to propose collaboration, or noticed an error in the corpusexcept typos in blogs and social media: these text are left "as is", please contact Timofey Arkhangelskiy. You can also use the Moksha morphological analyzer and the tsakorpus corpus platform, which are open source and freely available.