Drozhki (Дрожки)

- is a web application aimed at making texts of XIX-century Russian novels more comprehensible for a present-day reader. Click on the option "Upload text" and insert a literary fragment into the window. The module determins words which can be difficult to understand for a reader and matches them with their definitions from Small Academic Dictionary of the Russian Language. The definition can be seen when clicking on the word. Some short definitions are also accompanied by hovering tooltips. Since the scope of this module is the Russian literature, inserted texts should also be written in Russian.

Example:

Беспрестанно оглядываясь на со всех сторон двигавшиеся обозы выезжавших из Москвы и оправляясь своим тучным телом, чтобы не соскользнуть с дребезжащих старых дрожек, Пьер, испытывая радостное чувство, подобное тому, которое испытывает мальчик, убежавший из школы, разговорился с извозчиком. (Leo Tolstoy "War and Peace")

About this module

The module was realised withing the project "Live Pages" which primaral scope was interactive reading of "War and Peace". This web application makes commenting of rare vocabulary available for any Russian novel of XIX century. The module is based on the assumption that the lower the frequency of a word is, the more likely a reader does not know this word. As a measure of word "rarity", a frequency threshold was chosen, and some morphological filters were applied. The threshold was based on the ipm measure provided by the Frequency Dictionary for Russian. The source code is available on GitHub.