EDU-NER-2025: Named Entity Recognition in Urdu Educational Texts using XLM-RoBERTa with X (formerly Twitter)

Abstract

Named Entity Recognition (NER) plays a pivotal role in various Natural Language Processing (NLP) tasks by identifying and classifying named entities (NEs) from unstructured data into predefined categories such as person, organization, location, date, and time. While extensive research exists for high-resource languages and general domains, NER in Urdu particularly within domain-specific contexts like education remains significantly underexplored. This is Due to lack of annotated datasets for educational content which limits the ability of existing models to accurately identify entities such as academic roles, course names, and institutional terms, underscoring the urgent need for targeted resources in this domain. To the best of our knowledge, no dataset exists in the domain of the Urdu language for this purpose. To achieve this objective this study makes three key contributions. Firstly, we created a manually annotated dataset in the education domain, named EDU-NER-2025, which contains 13 unique most important entities related to education domain. Second, we describe our annotation process and guidelines in detail and discuss the challenges of labelling EDU-NER-2025 dataset. Third, we addressed and analyzed key linguistic challenges, such as morphological complexity and ambiguity, which are prevalent in formal Urdu texts.