BACKGROUND Researchers setting out to conduct research employing questionnaires in non-English speaking populations need instruments that have been validated in the indigenous languages. In this study we have tried to review the literature on the status of cross-cultural and/or criterion validity of all the questionnaires measuring psychiatric symptoms available in Urdu language. METHODS A se...

Speech Recognition for Urdu language is an interesting and less developed task. This is primarily due to the fact that linguistic resources such as rich corpus are not available for Urdu. Yet, few attempts have been made for developing Urdu speech recognition frameworks using the traditional approaches such as Hidden Markov Models and Neural Networks. In this work, we investigate the use of thr...

Optical Character Recognition (OCR) has been an attractive research area for the last three decades and mature OCR systems reporting near to 100% recognition rates are available for many scripts/languages today. Despite these developments, research on recognition of text in many languages is still in its early days, Urdu being one of them. The limited existing literature on Urdu OCR is either l...

Urdu is spoken by more than 100 million people across a score countries and is the national language of Pakistan (http://www. ethnologue.com). There is a great need for developing a text-to-speech system for Urdu because this population has low literacy rate and therefore speech interface would greatly assist in providing them access to information. One of the significant parts of a text-to-spe...

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 o...

Word Segmentation is the foremost obligatory task in almost all the NLP applications, where the initial phase requires tokenization of input into words. Like other Asian languages such as Chinese, Thai and Myanmar, Urdu also faces word segmentation challenges. Though the Urdu word segmentation problem is not as severe as the other Asian language, since space is used for word delimitation, but t...

Urdu is one of the most widely used languages in the world and there is a need of developing character recognition and word-spotting algorithms, so that Urdu literature can be made easily accessible and searchable to the Urdu reading population. Although there has been a sizeable research for character recognition, very few articles have been published for word-spotting in Urdu language. Unlike...

This work aims at the development of a representative treebank for the South Asian language Urdu. Urdu is a comparatively under resourced language and the development of a reliable treebank for Urdu will have significant impact on the state-of-the-art for Urdu language processing. In URDU.KON-TB treebank described here, a POS tagset, a syntactic tagset and a functional tagset have been proposed...

We develop a grammar for Urdu in Grammatical Framework (GF). GF is a programming language for defining multilingual grammar applications. GF resource grammar library currently supports 16 languages. These grammars follow an Interlingua approach and consist of morphology and syntax modules that cover a wide range of features of a language. In this paper we explore different syntactic features of...

This paper presents a technique for Word segmentation for the Urdu OCR system. Word segmentation or word tokenization is a preliminary task for understanding the meanings of sentences in Urdu language processing. Several techniques are available for word segmentation in other languages but not much work has been done for word segmentation of Urdu Optical Character Recognition (OCR) System. A me...