Collocations in Russian Lexicography and Russian Collocations Database

The paper presents the issue of collocability and collocations in Russian and gives a survey of a wide range of dictionaries both printed and online ones that describe collocations. Our project deals with building a database that will include dictionary and statistical collocations. The former can be described in various lexicographic resources whereas the latter can be extracted automatically from corpora. Dictionaries differ among themselves, the information is given in various ways, making it hard for language learners and researchers to acquire data. A number of dictionaries were analyzed and processed to retrieve verified collocations, however the overlap between the lists of collocations extracted from them is still rather small. This fact indicates there is a need to create a unified resource which takes into account collocability and more examples. The proposed resource will also be useful for linguists and for studying Russian as a foreign language. The obtained results can be important for machine learning and for other NLP tasks, for instance, automatic clustering of word combinations and disambiguation.