The paper presents a design schema and details of a new Urdu POS tagset. This tagset is designed due to challenges encountered in working with existing tagsets for Urdu. It uses tags that judiciously incorporate information about special morpho-syntactic categories found in Urdu. With respect to the overall naming schema and the basic divisions, the tagset draws on the Penn Treebank and a Common Tagset for Indian Languages. The resulting CLE Urdu POS Tagset consists of 12 major categories with subdivisions, resulting in 32 tags. The tagset has been used to tag 100k words of the CLE Urdu Digest Corpus, giving a tagging accuracy of 96.8%.

In this paper, we present a system for transliterating the Arabic-based script of Urdu to a Roman transliteration scheme. The system is integrated into a larger system consisting of a morphology module, implemented via finite state technologies, and a computational LFG grammar of Urdu that was developed with the grammar development platform XLE (Crouch et al. 2008). Our long-term goal is to handle Hindi alongside Urdu; the two languages are very similar with respect to syntax and lexicon and hence, one grammar can be used to cover both languages. However, they are not similar concerning the script -- Hindi is written in Devanagari, while Urdu uses an Arabic-based script. By abstracting away to a common Roman transliteration scheme in the respective transliterators, our system can be enabled to handle both languages in parallel. In this paper, we discuss the pipeline architecture of the Urdu-Roman transliterator, mention several linguistic and orthographic issues and present the integration of the transliterator into the LFG parsing system.