On Russian national corpus

The article describes the project of Russian National Corpus (RNC) – a powerful reference and information system in Russian language, created by a consortium of institutions belonging to the Russian Academy of Sciences and with the active participation of Russian IT-company Yandex. The history of the Corpus is presented in great detail: the author comments upon its main functionality and the most technologically advanced subcorpora – poetic, parallel, multimedian, providing examples of their use. Special attention is paid to the latest developments which allow us to introduce modern AI technologies in the RNC; this work was supported by a grant from the Ministry of Education and Science of the Russian Federation. One of the most impressive results is the so-called “panchronic corpus”, which encompasses the thousand-year history of the Russian language and provides searching tools within this data array. As of now, RNC is a crucial support for scientific research both in the field of linguistics and philology, as well as for the methodology of teaching Russian as first and second language and in the domain of IT technologies.