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 namevaluesexamples
gendermasculine inanimateстарый дом
(old house)
masculine animateстарый доктор
(old doctor)
feminineстарая женщина
(old woman)
neuterстарое место
(old place)
numbersingularбольшой дом
pluralбольшие дома
(big houses)
cases (noun)nominativeдом (home)
genitiveцвет дома
(the color of the house)
dativeОн дает цветы девушке.
(He gives flowers to the girl.)
accusativeМария видит дом.
(Maria sees the house.)
instrumentalОна идет с мальчиком.
(She goes with the boy.)
locativeОн говорит о доме.
(He talks about the house.)
adjectives (noun)before nounмилый дом
(sweet home)
verb tensespresentЯ ем
(I eat)
pastЯ ел
(I [masc.] ate)
futureЯ буду есть (ipf) / съем (pf)
(I will eat)
present participleедя́щий
(eating)
present participle passiveедомый
(eaten)
past participleе́вший
(having eaten)
past participle passiveеденный
(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:
SingularPlural
Nominativeдомдома
Genitiveдомадомов
Dativeдомудомам
Accusativeдомдома
Instrumentalдомомдомами
Prepositionalдомедомах

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.

cardinalordinal
textдевять дней
(nine days)
девятый день
(the ninth day)
digit9 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:

numeralcase / numberexample
1Nominative/Singularодин дом (1 house)
двадцать один дом (21 houses)
2-4Genitive/Singularтри дома (3 houses)
>= 5Genitive/Pluralсемь 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.