Background: The purpose of this study was to cognitively test the Urdu and English language versions of a survey to assess colon cancer screening behaviours among South Asian immigrants in Canada. Methods: The Colon Cancer Screening Behaviours Survey was cross-culturally translated and adapted into the Urdu language followed by cognitive interviews using an evidence-informed cross-cultural cogn...

Word Segmentation is the foremost obligatory task in almost all the NLP applications where the initial phase requires tokenization of input into words. Urdu is amongst the Asian languages that face word segmentation challenge. However, unlike other Asian languages, word segmentation in Urdu not only has space omission errors but also space insertion errors. This paper discusses how orthographic...

Hindi and Urdu share a common phonology, morphology and grammar but are written in different scripts. In addition, the vocabularies have also diverged significantly especially in the written form. In this paper we show that we can get reasonable quality translations (we estimated the Translation Error rate at 18%) between the two languages even in absence of a parallel corpus. Linguistic resour...

In this paper, we present what we believe to be the first data-driven dependency parser for Urdu. The parser was trained and tuned using MaltParser system, a system for data-driven dependency parsing. The Urdu dependency treebank (UDT) is used for training and testing of the Urdu dependency parser, is also presented first time. The UDT contains corpus of 2853 sentences which are annotated at mu...

Arabic script-based languages do not belong to a single language family, and therefore exhibit different linguistic properties. To name just a few: Arabic is primarily a VSO language whereas Farsi is an SVO and Urdu is an SOV language. Both Farsi and Urdu have light verbs whereas Arabic does not. Urdu and Arabic have grammatical gender while Farsi does not. There are, however, linguistic and no...

Social networks have recently emerged as the fastest and very effective medium to express news updates, trends and expression of personal views. There have been several studies to perform detailed sentiment analysis on such data in most of the developed languages. However, Urdu lacked any such study despite being spoken by around 30 Million people around the globe and used in regions with faste...

This paper presents the work on Automatic Speech Recognition of Urdu language, using a comparative analysis for Discrete Wavelets Transform (DWT) based features and Mel Frequency Cepstral Coefficients (MFCC). These features have been extracted for one hundred isolated words of Urdu, each word uttered by ten different speakers. The words have been selected from the most frequently used words of ...

This paper discusses genitive phrases in Hindi/Urdu in general and puts a particular focus on genitive scrambling, a process whereby the basic order of constituents is changed. In Hindi/Urdu, genitive phrases may not only occur at different structural positions within the NP that they modify; under the right circumstances, they can also be found outside of the NP, yielding discontinuous structu...

A benchmark database for character recognition is an essential part for efficient and robust development. Unfortunately, there is no comprehensive handwritten dataset for Urdu language that would be used to compare the state of the art techniques in the field of optical character recognition. In this paper, we present a new and publically available dataset comprising 600 pages of handwritten Ur...

This paper describes an approach for inferring syntactic frames of verbs in Urdu from an untagged corpus. Urdu, like many other South Asian languages, is a free word order and case-rich language. Separable lexical units mark different constituents for case in phrases and clauses and are called case clitics. There is not always a one to one correspondence between case clitic form and case, and c...