Using Cross-Lingual Projections to Generate Semantic Role Labeled Annotated Corpus for Urdu - A Resource Poor Language

In this paper we explore the possibility of using cross lingual projections that help to automatically induce role-semantic annotations in the PropBank paradigm for Urdu, a resource poor language. This technique provides annotation projections based on word alignments. It is relatively inexpensive and has the potential to reduce human effort involved in creating semantic role resources. The projection model exploits lexical as well as syntactic information on an English-Urdu parallel corpus. We show that our method generates reasonably good annotations with an accuracy of 92% on short structured sentences. Using the automatically generated annotated corpus, we conduct preliminary experiments to create a semantic role labeler for Urdu. The results of the labeler though modest, are promising and indicate the potential of our technique to generate large scale annotations for Urdu.