Multilingual Language Models like mBERT are widely used for low-resource NLP, yet their adaptation to morphologically inconsistent languages such as Roman Urdu remains underexplored. Roman Urdu spelling variation causes severe sub-word fragmentation, averaging 1.
The paper introduces a new benchmark for Urdu‑to‑English idiomatic translation, featuring 4,000 manually verified sentence pairs in both native Perso‑Arabic script and Romanized Urdu. It evaluates multiple tasks—translation, paraphrasing, idiom span detection, and back‑translation—using various prompting strategies, and finds that state‑of‑the‑art large language models outperform traditional neural machine translation systems, especially in preserving figurative meaning. The study also highlights challenges posed by the lack of standardized orthography in Romanized Urdu, which affects consistency and idiom span detection.
By Muhammad Farmal Khan, Mousumi Akter
The paper tackles syntactic parsing for Urdu, a morphologically rich language, and reports state‑of‑the‑art results for both constituency and dependency parsing. It introduces four key contributions: converting the CLE‑UTB phrase structure treebank into a dependency treebank with language‑specific mapping rules, a novel sequence labeling scheme that unifies the parsing task, training contextualized word representations on a 220‑million‑token Urdu corpus, and a parsing framework that employs both single‑task and multi‑task learning. Experiments show that the multi‑task setup boosts performance, achieving an F1 score of 91.39 for constituency parsing and a labeled attachment score of 85.69 for dependency parsing, improving over previous results.
By Toqeer Ehsan, Miriam Butt, Sarmad Hussain, Hassan Alhuzali, Ali Al-Laith
arXiv:2606.05087v2 Announce Type: replace
Abstract: Frequent verbs such as 'have' and 'make' can function either as collocates in light-verb constructions or as full lexical predicates, as in 'make a...
By Francesca Franzon, Nicolas Ros\`as G\'omez, Leo Wanner
The paper investigates how multilingual large language models perform when generating stories in Urdu, a low‑resource language. The authors created a corpus of 93 Urdu stories produced by GPT‑5.1, Qwen‑3‑Max, and DeepSeek‑3.1, and manually annotated errors across a nine‑label taxonomy covering linguistic, semantic, and cultural aspects. Findings reveal frequent grammatical and semantic mistakes, lack of coherence, unnatural repetition, and pervasive cultural shallowness, with few‑shot prompting failing to resolve many of these issues.
By Farah Adeeba, Abdul Rafae Khan, Rajesh Bhatt, Hassan Sajjad
arXiv:2610.15795v1 Announce Type: cross
Abstract: Automated moderation systems are deployed at scale, yet they remain opaque to the users and moderators affected by their decisions, and their coverag...
By Muhammad Shahid Iqbal Malik
arXiv:2606. 07167v1 Announce Type: cross Abstract: Meaningful multilingual evaluation must test models in the target language and educational context.
By Ahmer Tabassum, Sarfraz Ahmad, Hasan Iqbal, Owais Aijaz, Momina Ahsan, Preslav Nakov
The paper "Ghaib in Translation" investigates how large language models (LLMs) handle Urdu, a widely spoken language that is largely absent from safety evaluations. Five prominent LLMs—GPT‑4o, Claude Sonnet 4.5, Gemini 2.5 Flash, Qwen‑2.5, and Llama‑3.1—were tested on six datasets covering Nastaliq Urdu, Roman Urdu, English, and code‑switched Urdu‑English. The study found significant label instability between original‑script and English‑translation classifications, with missed‑in‑Urdu rates ranging from 2.4% to 9.9% (median 4.3%). A review of 205 papers across nine ALW/WOAH editions revealed no dedicated Urdu research, underscoring the language’s neglect in current safety research.
By Fawzia Zehra (Fuzzy), Kara-Isitt, Sonal Khosla, Stephen Swift
arXiv:2606. 07479v1 Announce Type: cross Abstract: Turkish idiomatic light verb constructions (LVCs) are challenging for multiword expression processing because they often share the same surface form as fully literal verb-object combinations while functioning as a single, partially idiomatic predicate.
By Sercan Karaka\c{s}, Yusuf \c{S}im\c{s}ek
arXiv:2608.21975v1 Announce Type: new
Abstract: This study examines the performance of the state-of-the-art MARBERT model in identifying the lexical/pragmatic category associated with emoji use on X...
By Mohammed Q. Shormani, Yehia A. AlSohbani, Mohammed Q. Shormani
arXiv:2607. 23319v1 Announce Type: cross Abstract: Standard subword tokenization algorithms such as Byte-Pair Encoding (BPE) and SentencePiece are trained predominantly on modern language corpora and produce inefficient segmentations when applied to classical Indian languages.
By Poornima Kumaresan, Pavithra Muruganantham, Lakshmi Rajendran, Santhosh Sivasubramani
The paper introduces UrduFactBench and UrduFactQA, two hand‑annotated benchmarks for claim verification and factual consistency evaluation in Urdu, created through a multi‑stage annotation process with native speakers. It also presents UrduFactCheck, a modular fact‑checking framework that uses both monolingual and translation‑based evidence retrieval to address the scarcity of high‑quality Urdu evidence. Experiments on twelve LLMs show that translation‑augmented pipelines outperform monolingual ones, highlighting ongoing challenges for open‑source models in Urdu.
By Sarfraz Ahmad, Hasan Iqbal, Momina Ahsan, Numaan Naeem, Muhammad Ahsan Riaz Khan, Arham Riaz, Muhammad Arslan Manzoor, Yuxia Wang, Preslav Nakov