Characteristics of the Russian language in AX Semantics
Fundamentals
In Russian, you need to know the gender of the noun in order to form the accompanying determiners, adjectives, and numerals correctly.
Russian has three genders for nouns: masculine, feminine, and neuter. Masculine nouns also differentiate between animate and inanimate There are two numbers: singular and plural. Additionally, Russian has six cases for nouns.
| grammatical name | values | examples |
|---|---|---|
| gender | masculine inanimate | старый дом (old house) |
| masculine animate | старый доктор (old doctor) | |
| feminine | старая женщина (old woman) | |
| neuter | старое место (old place) | |
| number | singular | большой дом |
| plural | большие дома (big houses) | |
| cases (noun) | nominative | дом (home) |
| genitive | цвет дома (the color of the house) | |
| dative | Он дает цветы девушке. (He gives flowers to the girl.) | |
| accusative | Мария видит дом. (Maria sees the house.) | |
| instrumental | Она идет с мальчиком. (She goes with the boy.) | |
| locative | Он говорит о доме. (He talks about the house.) | |
| adjectives (noun) | before noun | милый дом (sweet home) |
| verb tenses | present | Я ем (I eat) |
| past | Я ел (I [masc.] ate) | |
| future | Я буду есть (ipf) / съем (pf) (I will eat) | |
| present participle | едя́щий (eating) | |
| present participle passive | едомый (eaten) | |
| past participle | е́вший (having eaten) | |
| past participle passive | еденный (eaten) |
The standard order of a noun phrase in Russian is the following:
preposition + determiner + numeral + adjective + noun
See for example:
об этих трех популярных книгах
about these three popular books[pl,prep]
PREP DET NUM ADJ NOUN
"about these three popular books"
Lexicon
Nouns
For Russian nouns, the lexicon needs to encode gender, animacy and preposition changes. If the lexicon entry is missing, the NLG platform tries to find the most probable gender based on heuristics. The plural and case forms should be added to the lexicon if they are not regular.
Lexicon entries for nouns may also be necessary for inflecting determiners, adjectives, numerals and pronouns correctly. They are omitted, if a lexicon entry is required, but missing.
Examples
The basic lexicon entry for дом (house) contains:
- gender/animacy: masculine inanimate
- inflection table for case and number:
| Singular | Plural | |
|---|---|---|
| Nominative | дом | дома |
| Genitive | дома | домов |
| Dative | дому | домам |
| Accusative | дом | дома |
| Instrumental | домом | домами |
| Prepositional | доме | домах |
Note
If you need lexicon entries for countries, write to the support about that and you will get them for Russian with automatic handling of prepositions.
Adjectives
In the lexicon, the inflection table for gender, animacy, case, and number can be encoded. For adjective position, the default is "before noun".
Verbs
The most common verbs are encoded in our software. If a verb inflects the wrong way, you should add it to the lexicon.
Please note that the future tense can be formed in two ways. For imperfective verbs it is formed by taking the future tense conjugation of the verb быть (to be) and the infinitive (only the conjugated form needs to be in a container). For perfective verbs, the present form expresses the future. See for example the verbs читать and прочитать:
я буду читать
(I will read [imperfective])
я прочитаю
(I will read [perfective])
Container settings
Determiner
The AX NLG platform supports the following determiners for Russian: demonstrative, distal, possessive, quantifier (i.e., every and all).
Numerals
The noun will automatically agree with the numeral number when a numeral variable is used. Four types of numerals are possible on the AX NLG platform: cardinal, cardinal as digit, ordinal, and ordinal as digit.
| cardinal | ordinal | |
|---|---|---|
| text | девять дней (nine days) | девятый день (the ninth day) |
| digit | 9 дней (9 days) | 9-й день (the 9th day) |
For Russian, both cardinal and ordinal numerals are written out until 20 on the platform, otherwise (above 20) the output is in digit form. Take cardinal numerals for example:
двадцать автомобилей
(twenty cars)
vs.
21 автомобиль
(21 cars)
In Russian, case and number for noun/adjective change based on numerals, for example:
| numeral | case / number | example |
|---|---|---|
| 1 | Nominative/Singular | один дом (1 house) двадцать один дом (21 houses) |
| 2-4 | Genitive/Singular | три дома (3 houses) |
| >= 5 | Genitive/Plural | семь домов (7 houses) |
Prepositions
If users configure prepositions in the container, they are automatically adapted, if phonetic assimilation needs to happen. As the below example shows, the preposition в changes to во before words starting with ф/Ф.
в Штутгарте
(in Stuttgart)
во Франкфурте
(in Frankfurt)
Preposition switch
On the AX NLG platform the settings for the container Германия (Germany) are: preposition="в" and case="acc".
Летают из Японии в Германию.
(They fly from Japan to Germany.)
For the below sentence but with a different country (i.e. the Philippines), the platform settings are the same as above (preposition="в" and case="acc"), but the lexical information changes the result:
Летают из Японии на Филиппины.
(They fly from Japan to the Philippines.)
This example shows a preposition switch from в to на.