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<Paper uid="W02-1201">
  <Title>A Study in Urdu Corpus Construction</Title>
  <Section position="1" start_page="0" end_page="0" type="abstr">
    <SectionTitle>
Abstract
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    <Paragraph position="0"> We are interested in contributing a small, publicly available Urdu corpus of written text to the natural language processing community. The Urdu text is stored in the Unicode character set, in its native Arabic script, and marked up according to the Corpus Encoding Standard (CES) XML Document Type Definition (DTD). All the tags and metadata are in English. To date, the corpus is made entirely of data from British Broadcasting Company's (BBC) Urdu Web site, although we plan to add data from other Urdu newspapers.</Paragraph>
    <Paragraph position="1"> Upon completion, the corpus will consist mostly of raw Urdu text marked up only to the paragraph level so it can be used as input for natural language processing (NLP) tasks. In addition, it will be hand-tagged for parts of speech so the data can be used to train and test NLP tools.</Paragraph>
    <Paragraph position="2"> Introduction We are interested in contributing a small, publicly available Urdu corpus of written text to the natural language processing community. In pursuit of natural language processing research in Urdu, we could not find a publicly available Urdu corpus with which to work, so we had to start our own to train and test machine learning algorithms.</Paragraph>
    <Paragraph position="3"> The language engineering community seems anxious to move forward fast in research of South Asian languages, but cannot because corpora of South Asian languages are not ample. &amp;quot;There is a dearth of work on Indic languages. The need to focus on Indic languages was further strengthened by our major review (with over 80 research centres world wide responding) of the needs of the [language engineering] community. Indic languages are the ones that most researchers want to work with but cannot because lack of corpus resources&amp;quot; [1].</Paragraph>
  </Section>
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