Roman-txt: forms and functions of Roman Urdu texting

Abstract

In this paper, we present a user study conducted on students of a local university in Pakistan and collected a corpus of Roman Urdu text messages. We were interested in forms and functions of Roman Urdu text messages. To this end, we collected a mobile phone usage dataset. The data consists of 116 users and 346, 455 text messages. Roman Urdu text, is the most widely adopted style of writing text messages in Pakistan. Our user study leads to interesting results, for instance, we were able to quantitatively show that a number of words are written using more than one spelling; most participants of our study were not comfortable in English and hence they write their text messages in Roman Urdu; and the choice of language adopted by the participants sometimes varies according to who the message is being sent. Moreover we found that many young students send text messages(SMS) of intimate nature.