Authentic Russian Material

[B.M. SHUTTLEWORTH]

------- Forwarded Message Follows -------


Dear SEELANGers

To contribute to teaching and research programmes at the University
of Leeds, I am trying to put together a corpus of authentic written and
spoken Russian texts representing a range of different genres.  Can
anyone tell me if they know of (or where I could find out about) any
such corpora which are already in existence?  The genres I am
particularly interested in are:-

1. Student essays from Russian schools/universities
2. Personal/official letters
3. Conversation and other spoken material.

I'd be most interested in machine-readable archives (preferably KOI-8
format), and failing that printed/typed rather than handwritten material.

Any help would be greatly appreciated.  Please respond either to my
e-mail address or to the list.

With many thanks in anticipation

Mark Shuttleworth
Dept of Modern Slavonic Studies
University of Leeds
Leeds LS2 9JT
Great Britain
rusms at leeds.ac.uk
______________________________________________________________________

Dear SEELANGers

Thank you to all those who responded to my request of a couple of
weeks back. This is a brief summary of some of the replies I had
together with one or two things I already knew:-

1.  There are a couple of important ftp sites which contain corpora
    of Russian texts. These are as follows:-

    a) nic.funet.fi: a number of subdirectories of
       /pub/culture/russian/
    b) infomeister.osc.edu:
       /pub/central_eastern_europe/russian/corpora

2.  The Uppsala Russian Corpus (from Uppsala University, Sweden) is
    commercially available for about $600.

3.  An advanced Russian textbook due to be published by John
    Wiley & Sons later this year will contain a number of unscripted
    dialogues.

I also received a number of other suggestions, for which I am very
grateful.

Yours

Mark Shuttleworth
Department of Modern Slavonic Studies
University of Leeds
Leeds LS2 9JT
UK
rusms at leeds.ac.uk