Classifying Urdu Verbs Using Rule Based Approach

To make dictionaries complete and to keep their size restricted, there is an approach in the linguistic world to equip these dictionaries with morphological information. This module of morphological information is usually known as a morphological analyzer or morphological classifier, which normally contains the complete possible linguistic information about each word for that particular language and it also describes the rules of derivations from the root of a word and its various inflections, respectively. In this work, a classifier for Urdu verbs (CUV) is proposed which is still a challenging research issue, as Urdu is a language of high inflection and derivation. The available stemmers for Urdu do not provide enough information about inflectional and derivational forms of words. Also, morphological classifiers available for Urdu are not worthy of handling various problems and delivering results that prune errors. In our work, a rule based CUV is designed which is able to classify 63 forms of Urdu verbs successfully out of 66. Available Urdu language processing tools are very rare compared to other higher inflectional languages such as German, Turkish, etc., which have competitive morphological classifiers. However, the studies related to Urdu verb morphological classification are identified and a comparative study is presented in this article. In short, this work is a positive contribution to the community, and it provides sufficient information with promising results specifically on inflectional and derivational forms of Urdu verbs.