Studying Word Sketches for Russian

Without any doubt corpora are vital tools for linguistic studies and solution for applied tasks. Although corpora opportunities are very useful, there is a need of another kind of software for further improvement of linguistic research as it is impossible to process huge amount of linguistic data manually. The Sketch Engine representing itself a corpus tool which takes as input a corpus of any language and corresponding grammar patterns. The paper describes the writing of Sketch grammar for the Russian language as a part of the Sketch Engine system. The system gives information about a word’s collocability on concrete dependency models, and generates lists of the most frequent phrases for a given word based on appropriate models. The paper deals with two different approaches to writing rules for the grammar, based on morphological information, and also with applying word sketches to the Russian language. The data evidences that such results may find an extensive use in various fields of linguistics, such as dictionary compiling, language learning and teaching, translation (including machine translation), phraseology, information retrieval etc.