Constructing a Semantic Corpus for Russian: SemOntoCor

The SemOntoCor project focuses on creating a semantic corpus of Russian based on linguistic and ontological resources. It is a satellite project with regard to a semantic parser (SemETAP) being developed, the latter aiming at producing semantic structures and drawing various types of inferences. SemETAP is used to annotate SemOntoCor in a semi-automatic mode, whereupon SemOntoCor, when reaching sufficient maturity, will help create new parsers and other semantic applications. SemOntoCor can be viewed as a further step in the development of SynTagRus with its several layers of annotation. SemOntoCor builds on top of the morpho-syntactic annotation of SynTagRus and assigns each sentence a Basic Semantic Structure (BSemS). BSemS represents the direct layer of meaning of the sentence in terms of ontological concepts and semantic relations between them. It abstracts away from lexico-syntactic variation and in many cases decomposes lexical meanings into smaller elements. The first phase of SemOntoCor consists in annotating a Russian translation of the novel “The Little Prince” by Antoine de Saint-Exupery (1532 sentences, 13120 tokens).