--- title: "Scripting History — Shams 2026" description: "Historical Urdu has had almost no computational resources." authors: ["Sana Shams", "Sahar Rauf", "Asad Mustafa", "Muhammad Zeeshan Javed", "Qurat-ul-Ain Akram", "Sarmad Hussain", "Miriam Butt"] year: 2026 venue: "Proceedings of the Fifteenth Language Resources and Evaluation Conference" source: "https://aclanthology.org/2026.lrec-1.127/" doi: "10.63317/48tdw3hsxp47" licence: "CC BY-NC 4.0 (ELRA, LREC proceedings)" licence_url: "https://creativecommons.org/licenses/by-nc/4.0/" summary_licence: "Elamur Cosmic License" canonical: "https://research.elamur.ai/free/en/papers/shams-2026-scripting-history-diachronic-urdu-text/" --- [Elamur Research](https://md.research.elamur.ai/free/en/) · [this page in HTML](https://research.elamur.ai/free/en/papers/shams-2026-scripting-history-diachronic-urdu-text/) [home](https://md.research.elamur.ai/free/en/) / [papers](https://md.research.elamur.ai/free/en/papers/) / [2026](https://md.research.elamur.ai/free/en/papers/2026/page/8/) / Scripting History: A Diachronic Urdu Text and Image Corpus from the 18Th to 19Th Centuries # Scripting History: A Diachronic Urdu Text and Image Corpus from the 18Th to 19Th Centuries **Authors:** [Sana Shams](https://md.research.elamur.ai/free/en/authors/sana-shams/), Sahar Rauf, Asad Mustafa, Muhammad Zeeshan Javed, Qurat-ul-Ain Akram, [Sarmad Hussain](https://md.research.elamur.ai/free/en/authors/sarmad-hussain/), [Miriam Butt](https://md.research.elamur.ai/free/en/authors/miriam-butt/) · **Year:** 2026 · **Venue:** Proceedings of the Fifteenth Language Resources and Evaluation Conference · **Licence:** [CC BY-NC 4.0 (ELRA, LREC proceedings)](https://creativecommons.org/licenses/by-nc/4.0/) **Links:** [Publisher's page](https://aclanthology.org/2026.lrec-1.127/) · [PDF](https://aclanthology.org/2026.lrec-1.127.pdf) · [DOI 10.63317/48tdw3hsxp47](https://doi.org/10.63317/48tdw3hsxp47) · [OpenAlex](https://openalex.org/W7160207287) **Citations:** 0 citations (openalex-snapshot · 2026-10-14) ## Summary Historical Urdu has had almost no computational resources. Existing Urdu corpora and tools focus on the modern language, so changes in spelling, word formation and sentence structure during Urdu's standardization period could not be studied with corpus methods. The authors fill this gap with DUTI (Diachronic Urdu Text and Image corpus). It contains about one million words drawn from printed books published between 1800 and 1950, the period when Urdu became a standardized register separate from Hindi. The source books came from online collections. The selection was balanced across fifteen decades, several genres and major publishing cities. Because early-century material is scarce, more pages were taken from each surviving pre-1850 book. Every transcribed page is linked to its scanned image, which makes DUTI the first multimodal diachronic resource for Urdu. A portion of the text is also hand-tagged for part of speech. The corpus is freely released and supports historical linguistics, digital humanities and OCR work on old lithographed and handwritten-style Urdu print. ## Key points - Scale: roughly 1M words from 3,439 pages of 328 books dated 1800–1950. The text is aligned with 3,439 JPEG page images. - Annotation: a 140,000-word subset carries manual Urdu POS tags. - Sources: 12 books from the World Digital Library and 49 from the Iqbal Cyber Library. The rest came from Urdu Channel and the Internet Archive. - Coverage: genres include history, religion, science and literature. Main publishing centers are Lucknow, Lahore, Hyderabad and Delhi, with additional material from Agra, Meerut, Aligarh, Mumbai and Pathankot. Pages were chosen for clean scans, mostly Urdu content and few non-text elements. - Availability: the corpus is free on GitHub (clekics/diachronic-urdu-corpus). *Our summary of the paper, in our own words — not its text. The work belongs to its authors; read it at the links above.* Fields: [Linguistics & languages](https://md.research.elamur.ai/free/en/shelves/linguistics/) Topics: [Part-of-speech tagging](https://md.research.elamur.ai/free/en/topics/part-of-speech-tagging/) ## Cite The paper itself, not this page. BibTeX from the library's record of the work. ```bibtex @inproceedings{shams2026scripting, title = {{Scripting History: A Diachronic Urdu Text and Image Corpus from the 18Th to 19Th Centuries}}, author = {Shams, Sana and Rauf, Sahar and Mustafa, Asad and Javed, Muhammad Zeeshan and Akram, Qurat-ul-Ain and Hussain, Sarmad and Butt, Miriam}, booktitle = {Proceedings of the Fifteenth Language Resources and Evaluation Conference}, year = {2026}, doi = {10.63317/48tdw3hsxp47}, url = {https://doi.org/10.63317/48tdw3hsxp47} } ``` - [← previous Script Correction and Synthetic Pivoting: Adapting Tencent HY-MT for Low-Resource Turkic Translation](https://md.research.elamur.ai/free/en/papers/maxim-2026-script-correction-synthetic-pivoting-adapting/) - [next → SearchLLM: Detecting LLM Paraphrased Text by Measuring the Similarity with Regeneration of the Candidate Source via Search Engine](https://md.research.elamur.ai/free/en/papers/son-2026-searchllm-detecting-llm-paraphrased-text/) - [↑ back to papers of 2026](https://md.research.elamur.ai/free/en/papers/2026/page/8/) ## References 29 references, 0 of them with a card of ours. ↗ leads to the work, «find» searches for one we have no id for yet. 1. 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