Unicode Standard Urdu text corpus of  5161927  Words| 739 Titles | Data and Metadata in XML format | 5 Text domains.

Urdu is one among the prominent language used in Indian sub-continent. It belongs to the Indo-Aryan family. Urdu is influenced by Arabic and Persian. Urdu is written in Perso-Arabic script. On the other hand region-wise Urdu language is co-existed side by side mostly in the northern part of India, north-west and eastern parts of India and Pakistan also, although understood and spoken occasionally in the rest of India. Urdu is arisen in the 10th century A.D. due to occupation relations, ethnic exchanges, relocations and military expeditions. Urdu in India is basically developed in close contact with Persian, which was the language of administration and education during the period of Muslim rule.  LDC-IL Urdu Text Corpus developed according to various factors such as quality of the text, representativeness, retrievable format, size of corpus, authenticity etc. For collecting text corpus LDC-IL adopts a standard category list of various domains and a prior set of criteria. The corpus of Urdu text can be broadly classified as literary and non- literary texts. Huge amount of literary texts are available in Urdu but scientific texts are less thus LDC-IL attempts to develop balanced text corpora of Urdu. Data has been collected from books, magazines and newspapers and it is verified true to the original text.

Urdu Text Corpus encoded in a machine readable form and stored in a standard format. The major encoding being used is Unicode and stored in XML format. The data is embedded with metadata information. The corpus has been created from contemporary text in typed and crawled methods. The data is drawn from five major domains, namely Aesthetics, Commerce, Mass Media, Science & Technology and Social Science.