Tafseer Ahmed

Also published as: Tafseer Ahmed Khan


2014

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The CLE Urdu POS Tagset
Saba Urooj | Sarmad Hussain | Asad Mustafa | Rahila Parveen | Farah Adeeba | Tafseer Ahmed Khan | Miriam Butt | Annette Hautli
Proceedings of the Ninth International Conference on Language Resources and Evaluation (LREC'14)

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%.

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Automatic acquisition of Urdu nouns (along with gender and irregular plurals)
Tafseer Ahmed Khan
Proceedings of the Ninth International Conference on Language Resources and Evaluation (LREC'14)

The paper describes a set of methods to automatically acquire the Urdu nouns (and its gender) on the basis of inflectional and contextual clues. The algorithms used are a blend of computer’s brute force on the corpus and careful design of distinguishing rules on the basis linguistic knowledge. As there are homograph inflections for Urdu nouns, adjectives and verbs, we compare potential inflectional forms with paradigms of inflections in strict order and gives best guess (of part of speech) for the word. We also worked on irregular plurals i.e. the plural forms that are borrowed from Arabic, Persian and English. Evaluation shows that not all the borrowed rules have same productivity in Urdu. The commonly used borrowed plural rules are shown in the result.

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Adapting Predicate Frames for Urdu PropBanking
Riyaz Ahmad Bhat | Naman Jain | Ashwini Vaidya | Martha Palmer | Tafseer Ahmed Khan | Dipti Misra Sharma | James Babani
Proceedings of the EMNLP’2014 Workshop on Language Technology for Closely Related Languages and Language Variants

2012

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Identifying Urdu Complex Predication via Bigram Extraction
Miriam Butt | Tina Bögel | Annette Hautli | Sebastian Sulger | Tafseer Ahmed
Proceedings of COLING 2012

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A Reference Dependency Bank for Analyzing Complex Predicates
Tafseer Ahmed | Miriam Butt | Annette Hautli | Sebastian Sulger
Proceedings of the Eighth International Conference on Language Resources and Evaluation (LREC'12)

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.

2011

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Discovering Semantic Classes for Urdu N-V Complex Predicates
Tafseer Ahmed | Miriam Butt
Proceedings of the Ninth International Conference on Computational Semantics (IWCS 2011)

2010

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Transliterating Urdu for a Broad-Coverage Urdu/Hindi LFG Grammar
Muhammad Kamran Malik | Tafseer Ahmed | Sebastian Sulger | Tina Bögel | Atif Gulzar | Ghulam Raza | Sarmad Hussain | Miriam Butt
Proceedings of the Seventh International Conference on Language Resources and Evaluation (LREC'10)

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.