The paper describes the RuThes family of Russian thesauri intended for natural language processing and information retrieval applications. RuThes-like thesauri include, besides RuThes, Sociopolitical thesaurus, Security Thesaurus, and Ontology on Natural Sciences and Technologies. The RuThes format is based on three approaches for developing computer resources: Princeton WordNet, information-retrieval thesauri, and formal ontologies. The published version of RuThes thesaurus (RuThes-lite 2.0) became a basis for semi-automatic generation of RuWordNet, WordNet-like thesaurus for Russian. Currently researchers can use both RuThes-lite or RuWordNet and compare them in applications. Other RuThes-like resources are being prepared to publication.

In the paper we presented a new Russian wordnet, RuWordNet, which was semi-automatically obtained by transformation of the existing Russian thesaurus RuThes. At the first step, the basic structure of wordnets was reproduced: synsets’ hierarchy for each part of speech and the basic set of relations between synsets (hyponym-hypernym, part-whole, antonyms). At the second stage, we added causation, entailment and domain relations between synsets. Also derivation relations were established for single words and the component structure for phrases included in RuWordNet. The described procedure of transformation highlights the specific features of each type of thesaurus representations.

The paper describes the main principles of development and current state of Linguistic Ontology on Natural Sciences and Technology intended for information-retrieval tasks. In the development of the ontology we combined three different methodologies: development of information-retrieval thesauri, development of wordnets, formal ontology research. Combination of these methodologies allows us to develop large ontologies for broad domains.

In the paper we describe development, means of evaluation and applications of Russian-English Sociopolitical Thesaurus specially developed as a linguistic resource for automatic text processing applications. The Sociopolitical domain is not a domain of social research but a broad domain of social relations including economic, political, military, cultural, sports and other subdomains. The knowledge of this domain is necessary for automatic text processing of such important documents as official documents, legislative acts, newspaper articles.

In the paper we describe our approach to development of ontologies with small number of relation types. Non-taxonomic relations in our ontologies are based on ontological dependence conception described in the formal ontology. This minimal relations set does not depend on a domain or a task and makes possible to begin the ontology construction at once, as soon as a task is set and a domain is determined, to receive the first version of an ontology in short time. Such an initial ontology can be used for information-retrieval applications and can serve as a structural basis for further development of the ontology