The Grammatical Interpretation of Russian Inflected Forms Using a Stem Dictionary

THE NPL Russian-English automatic dictionary is organised on a stem-paradigm basis wherein there is for most nouns and adjectives a single entry for all their inflected forms and for most verbs only one or two entries. This is in contrast to the full-form type of dictionary organisation wherein each inflected form of every word has a separate entry. The decision to organise our dictionary on this basis was made so as to be able to accommodate it on the magnetic tape store available to us on the ACE digital electronic computer of our laboratory, and, further, to minimise the look-up time per word on the computer without complicating the look-up procedure too much or investing too much programming effort in its compilation. The word content of the dictionary initially is to be 15,000 words from the Harvard University Automatic Dictionary. Out dictionary will have an average of about 1.5 entries per word, whereas a fullform dictionary would have about ten times that average.