Data-Driven Approach to Identification of Latin Phrases in Russian Web-Crawled Corpora

Latin phrases are an integral part of the language of educated speakers in many (European) languages. Besides lexical units of Latin origin that have been already adapted to the orthography of the respective host language and calques, phrases retaining the original form and orthography can also be found in many texts. Due to the rather low frequency of the phenomenon, however, any systematic attempt of its analysis was a real challenge before the advent of very large (multi-Gigaword) corpora. Our paper presents a method of semi-automatic detection of Latin phrases in a Russian web corpus based on applying a Latin tagger and a series of filtrations performed by standard Linux utilities. The preliminary analysis of the resulting candidate list is shown in the concluding part of the paper.