Towards building a Urdu Language Corpus using Common Crawl

Abstract

Urdu is the most popular language in Pakistan which is spoken by millions of people across the globe. While English is considered the dominant web content language, characteristics of Urdu language web content are still unknown. In this paper, we study the World-Wide-Web (WWW) by focusing on the content present in the Perso-Arabic script. Leveraging from the Common Crawl Corpus, which is the largest publicly available web content of 2.87 billion documents for the period of December 2016, we examine different aspects of Urdu web content. We use the Compact Language Detector (CLD2) for language detection. We find that the global WWW population has a share of 0.04% for Urdu web content with respect to document frequency. 70.9% of the top-level Urdu domains consist of . com, . org, and . info. Besides, urdulughat is the most dominating second-level domain. 40% of the domains are hosted in the United States while only 0.33% are hosted within Pakistan. Moreover, 25.68% web-pages have Urdu as primary language and only 11.78% of web-pages are exclusively in Urdu. Our Urdu corpus consists of 1.25 billion total and 18.14 million unique tokens. Furthermore, the corpus follows the Zipf’s law distribution. This Urdu Corpus can be used for text summarization, text classification, and cross-lingual information retrieval.