CURE: Collection for Urdu Information Retrieval Evaluation and Ranking

Abstract: Urdu is a widely spoken language with 163 million speakers worldwide across the globe. Information Retrieval (IR) for Urdu entails special consideration of research community due to its rich morphological features and a large number of speakers. In general, IR evaluation task is not extensively explored for Urdu. The most important missing element is the availability of a standardized evaluation corpus specific to Urdu. In this research work, we propose and construct a standard test collection of Urdu documents for IR evaluation and named it Collection for Urdu Retrieval Evaluation (CURE). We select 1,096 unique documents against 50 diverse queries from a large collection of 0.5 million crawled documents using two IR models. The purpose of test collection is the evaluation of IR models, ranking algorithms, and different natural language processing techniques. Next, we perform binary relevance judgment on the selected documents. We also built two other language resources for lemmatization and query expansion specific to our test collection. Evaluation of test collection is carried out using four retrieval models as well using the stop-words list, lemmatization, and query expansion. Furthermore, error analysis was performed for each query with different NLP techniques. To the best of our knowledge, this work is the first attempt for preparing a standardized information retrieval evaluation test collection for the Urdu language.