On Russian Morphology

[rg-software.livejournal.com]

Hi everybody.

I would like to present here a simple tool I am working on. It should help to study Russian :)
I guess, one of the problems of this language is rich morphology, which is especially hard for English speakers.
The tool is a morphology analyzer/generator that allows to do two basic things:
- to input a word and to see its attributes (part of speech, gender, case, etc.)
- to set some attributes and to see the corresponding word forms.

This is not an advertisement, as this tool is free, and will remain free while I am working on it ;) This software is still far from being complete/perfect, so I'd be happy to get some valuable feedback... and also I have some future plans to turn it into something more powerful.


Here is a screenshot:

And here is the link to the package. Still no homepage, just testing it...

Some tech notes:
- The GUI is written in C#, so you might need to update .NET package on your PC;
- You also might need to install VC++ Redistributable (get it here).

P.S. Forgot to put it onto the screenshot: the drop-down list with the word may contain several elements when you GENERATE some wordform. E.g. you can set grammar case to empty line, and get all cases for a given word in this list.

P.P.S. I am a native Russian speaker, so feel free to ask any tricky questions on the subject ;)

Comments

[surkova.livejournal.com]

you may also highlight the word's stress ;)

[rg-software.livejournal.com]

Honestly speaking, I make use of a ready-made morph analyzing module.
It has a number of limitations. Stress is maybe one of them. Another trouble is lack of "Ё" letter support.

[ruthus.livejournal.com]

Take a look at Sergei Starostin's “Tower of Babel” where you can find an online morphological analyzer:
http://starling.rinet.ru
http://starling.rinet.ru/cgi-bin/morphque.cgi?flags=endnnnn

[rg-software.livejournal.com]

Thanks for the suggestion!

In fact, my software is mostly a GUI/frontend for another ready-made tool, available at http://aot.ru/

The strong point of this software is the availability of word form generator, which should be nice for a language learner, I suppose.

[archaicos.livejournal.com]

What you're trying to get is a more or less tagged word frequency list derived from a text corpus of Russian.
Something like this one, except with all inclinations in all cases: http://www.artint.ru/projects/frqlist/frqlist-en.asp.

Also, it may be hard to correctly generate all word forms based only on the base forms and some rules and patterns. I'm sure there many exceptions and if you simply generate them, chances are you'll have many mistakes.

[rg-software.livejournal.com]

Well, that's all true, but honestly speaking here I am more interested on the feedback on usability/usefulness/pros and contras -- stuff like that...

As of tech side, there are enough discussions and approaches, but I NEVER seen a Morph analyzer/generator (at least, for Russian), which is ready to be used by normal language learners (and not only by computer geeks).

[archaicos.livejournal.com]

Would be great to:
- find base forms from their derivatives
- be able to practice with it (just like with flash cards)
- provide sample sentences in the tool
- process given text with it and annotate rare or difficult words