Implementing Urdu Grammar as Open Source Software

Urdu is a challenging language because of, first, its Perso-Arabic script, second, its morphological system having inherent grammatical forms and vocabulary of Arabic, Persian and the native languages of South Asia and third, its pragmatically neutral constituent order (SOV Subject Object Verb). Today, the state of art technology to write grammars (morphology + syntax) is to use specialpurpose languages based on finite-state technology. These languages are mostly based on regular expressions. In our opinion, these languages are still close to the machine code. Therefore, we emphasis on using a higher level language to capture the linguistic abstraction. Then that higher level code should be translated into finite state code by some tool if required.