The Parallel Corpus of R ussian and Ruska R omani Languages (2024)

Abstract: The paper presents a parallel corpus for the Ruska Romani dialect and Russian language. Ruska Romani is the dialect of Romani language attributed to Ruska Roma, the largest subgroup of Romani people in Russia. The corpus contains the translations of Russian literature into Ruska Romani dialect. The corpus creation involved manual alignment of a small part of translations with original works, fine-tuning a language model on the aligned pairs, and using the fine-tuned model to align the remaining data. Ruska Romani sentences were annotated using a morphological analyzer, with rules crafted for proper nouns and borrowings. The corpus, available in JSON and Russian National Corpus XML formats. It includes 88,742 Russian tokens and 84,635 Ruska Romani tokens, 74,291 of which were grammatically annotated. The corpus could be used for linguistic research, including comparative and diachronic studies, bilingual dictionary creation, stylometry research, and NLP/MT tool development for Ruska Romani.

## introduction ruska romani is the dialect of romani language attributed to ruska roma, the largest subgroup of romani people in russia. ruska roma makes up at least 50% of all romani people in russia and the number of speakers of the dialect can be estimated at 70-90 thousand @xcite . in general, the ruska romani dialect is characterized by a significant influence on the russian language at all levels it also contains a significant number of lexical grammatical borrowings from german, and polish @xcite . the cyrillic script for the ruska romani dialect was developed by @xcite . this paper presents the parallel corpus for ruska romani and russian languages. to create the corpus, we found russian literature translated into * work is partially done while at hse university. ruska romani in the 1920-30s. we choose russian literature of that period as a large number of russian texts were translated then into minority languages as a part of government language policy @xcite . as a result, many of ruska romani written texts were created. even today these texts make up the majority of literature written in ruska romani. moreover, many of them are available in the machine-readable format. the translated texts include both fiction and nonfiction domains. we manually aligned a subsample of sentences from the translations with sentences from the original works and fine-tuned labse model @xcite on the aligned pairs and used it within lingtrain-aligner library foot_0 for python to align the rest of the data. finally, ruska romani sentences were annotated using uniparser-sovietromani foot_1 library and our manually crafted rules. the parallel corpus of russian and ruska romani is available as the part russian national corpus (rnc) foot_2 . the data both in json format and xml format of the rnc together with code are also publicly available via our repository foot_3 . the corpus includes 88,742 russian tokens and 84,635 ruska romani tokens, 74,291 of which are grammatically annotated. our parallel corpus could be used for: moreover, it contributes to the representation ruska romani dialect and romani culture overall. ## resources for ruska romani the ruska romani dialect is one of the most described romani dialects. it was described in grammars by @xcite ; ventcel @xcite and has several dictionaries created by @xcite ; demeter-charskaya (2007); vasilevskij @xcite . however, there are almost no electronic resources for ruska romani dialect. the only exceptions are romani corpus 5 and digitized version of russian -ruska romani dictionary from shapoval (2007) foot_5 . the romani corpus contains ruska romani texts published in the ussr in the 1920s and 1930s (both original works and translations from russian). the corpus consists of 720k tokens. the morphological annotations of the tokens in the corpus were not disambiguated. despite a large number of translations from russian to ruska romani, there are no parallel corpora for these two languages. ## data format our parallel corpus is available in two formats: json and rnc xml. see the project repository for a more detailed description. ## conclusion we presented the parallel corpus for russian and ruska romani languages. for sentence alignment, we used a model trained on manually aligned sentences. we also manually checked alignment in sentence pairs, where the model predicted low similarity for sentences. ruska romani sentences in the corpus were annotated using uniparser-sovietromani library and our own manually crafted rules. the data is available in json and rnc xml formats. our work could be used in different areas: from linguistic research and language teaching to the creation of nlp tools and resources for ruska romani. it also contributes to the representation of ruska romani dialect and romani culture as the corpus is available in rnc, one of the largest platforms with resources for the russian language and minority languages of russia.