Urdu and Hindi: Translation and sharing of linguistic resources

Hindi and Urdu share a common phonol-ogy, morphology and grammar but are written in different scripts. In addition, the vocabularies have also diverged signif-icantly especially in the written form. In this paper we show that we can get rea-sonable quality translations (we estimated the Translation Error rate at 18%) between the two languages even in absence of a parallel corpus. Linguistic resources such as treebanks, part of speech tagged data and parallel corpora with English are lim-ited for both these languages. We use the translation system to share linguistic re-sources between the two languages. We demonstrate improvements on three tasks and show: statistical machine translation from Urdu to English is improved (0.8 in BLEU score) by using a Hindi-English parallel corpus, Hindi part of speech tag-ging is improved (upto 6 % absolute) by using an Urdu part of speech corpus and a Hindi-English word aligner is improved by using a manually word aligned Urdu-English corpus (upto 9 % absolute in F-Measure)