Searching for English Verbs With Urdu Meaning Semantic Scholar Resources
Semantic Scholar is mostly used for finding academic papers on machine translation, computational linguistics, and Urdu-English bilingual dictionaries. If you are looking for structured verb mapping data — English verbs paired with their Urdu equivalents — the platform won't hand you a clean CSV file. You will need to search strategically and piece together what you can from the papers that come up. Start your search with queries like "Urdu English parallel corpus verb mapping" or "Urdu-English bilingual lexical resources." The results will mostly point to papers from venues like LREC, COLING, or ACL. A few notable ones include resources from the Pakistan Virtual Library projects, the Urdu-English translation corpora from LUMS researchers, and the South Asian Language Resource Consortium datasets. None of these are specifically verb-focused, so you extract verbs from larger bilingual corpora yourself. I spent about three weeks last year trying to compile a clean list of transitive and intransitive English verbs with Urdu equivalents for a classroom tool. What I learned was that most available corpora — like the OPUS collection or Ushaqi — contain parallel sentences, not word-aligned verb lists. You have to run alignment tools like Berkeley Aligner or GIZA++ on the raw text. That process alone takes effort. The Urdu side uses Nasta'liq script which many standard alignment tools struggle with unless you normalize to Nastaleeq-compatible Unicode and strip diacritics first.
The papers that actually contain verb-level mappings tend to be buried in appendix tables. One useful find was a 2019 paper by researchers at FAST National University that included a small verb glossary. It had maybe 400 entries. Not enough for serious use but a solid starting point. Another was the Urdu WordNet from IIIT Hyderabad — it covers Urdu lexical semantics but the English-Urdu bridging is sparse for verb senses. You can cross-reference the English WordNet verb synsets against the Urdu WordNet entries manually if you need high precision. Here is the practical workflow I ended up using. I pulled the Urdu-English parallel corpus from OPUS, filtered for sentences containing basic transitive verbs from the Frequency Dictionary of Modern Standard Arabic and Persian equivalent lists (since Urdu borrows heavily from Persian vocabulary in its verb system), ran the alignment, extracted verb pairs, and then verified each pair against the Urdu dictionaries available through the Karachi Dictionary Project online. The whole process took about 40 hours for roughly 2,000 verb entries with decent coverage. Automating verification is possible with simple script matching against known Urdu root words, but accuracy drops significantly below 70 percent without manual checking because Urdu verbs often have multiple forms depending on transitivity, honorifics, and aspect markers that English simply does not encode. If you need something faster, there is no perfect shortcut. The open-source datasets that exist are either too broad or too shallow. I would recommend checking the GitHub repositories tied to the Semantic Scholar papers you find — several authors have released cleaned lexicons in their repos. Search for "urdu-english-verb-lexicon" or look at the resource links section of relevant papers. The download format is usually JSON or tab-separated, sometimes just plain text with limited documentation.
One thing most people miss when working with these resources is that Urdu verbs are not direct one-to-one mappings with English verbs in many cases. A single English verb like "to get" can map to at least eight different Urdu verbs depending on context — . Any dataset claiming clean one-to-one mapping is oversimplified and will cause errors if you use it for anything beyond casual reference. Build your own filtering layer that accounts for polysemy, or you will waste more time correcting mistakes than you save. The Semantic Scholar API can help you automate discovery of new papers on this topic. Use their endpoint to search by keyword and sort by citation count. The top-cited papers in this niche are usually the same ones that get referenced repeatedly, so they are reliable starting points. But the API rate limits are real — around 100 requests per minute without an academic key, and even with a key you will hit walls if you are pulling metadata in bulk. Cache your results locally. There is also the option of using the Semantic Scholar Corpus dataset, which contains millions of papers with extracted text. If you download the full corpus and grep for Urdu-language papers about English verb pedagogy, you might find localized teaching materials that contain verb lists not available elsewhere. This approach is slower but it surfaces resources that traditional search misses entirely. I found two university-level Urdu grammar handbooks this way that had verb conjugation tables with English glosses. Those were gold compared to the standard corpus alignments.
Get the Full Details

Bottom line: Semantic Scholar is excellent for discovering the sources. It is not a repository of ready-to-use verb translation data. Expect to do alignment work, manual verification, and some script normalization before you have anything usable. The effort is worth it if you need academically grounded data, but for quick lookup purposes a standard dictionary app or a community-maintained glossary will serve you faster with acceptable accuracy.