When dealing with languages of South Asia from an NLP perspective, a problem that repeatedly crops up is the treatment of complex predicates. This paper presents a first approach to the analysis of complex predicates (CPs) in the context of dependency bank development. The efforts originate in theoretical work on CPs done within Lexical-Functional Grammar (LFG), but are intended to provide a guideline for analyzing different types of CPs in an independent framework. Despite the fact that we focus on CPs in Hindi and Urdu, the design of the dependencies is kept general enough to account for CP constructions across languages.

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.