Text reuse is the act of borrowing text from existing documents to create new texts. Freely available and easily accessible large online repositories are not only making reuse of text more common in society but also harder to detect. A major hindrance in the development and evaluation of existing/new mono-lingual text reuse detection methods, especially for South Asian languages, is the unavailability of standardized benchmark corpora. Amongst other things, a gold standard corpus enables researchers to directly compare existing state-of-the-art methods. In our study, we address this gap by developing a benchmark corpus for one of the widely spoken but under resourced languages i.e. Urdu. The COrpus of Urdu News TExt Reuse (COUNTER) corpus contains 1200 documents with real examples of text reuse from the field of journalism. It has been manually annotated at document level with three levels of reuse: wholly derived, partially derived and non derived. We also apply a number of similarity estimation methods on our corpus to show how it can be used for the development, evaluation and comparison of text reuse detection systems for the Urdu language. The corpus is a vital resource for the development and evaluation of text reuse detection systems in general and specifically for Urdu language.

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Text reuse is becoming a serious issue in many fields and research shows that it is much harder to detect when it occurs across languages. The recent rise in multi-lingual content on the Web has increased cross-language text reuse to an unprecedented scale. Although researchers have proposed methods to detect it, one major drawback is the unavailability of large-scale gold standard evaluation resources built on real cases. To overcome this problem, we propose a cross-language sentence/passage level text reuse corpus for the English-Urdu language pair. The Cross-Language English-Urdu Corpus (CLEU) has source text in English whereas the derived text is in Urdu. It contains in total 3,235 sentence/passage pairs manually tagged into three categories that is near copy, paraphrased copy, and independently written. Further, as a second contribution, we evaluate the Translation plus Mono-lingual Analysis method using three sets of experiments on the proposed dataset to highlight its usefulness. Evaluation results (f 1 =0.732 binary, f 1 =0.552 ternary classification) indicate that it is harder to detect cross-language real cases of text reuse, especially when the language pairs have unrelated scripts. The corpus is a useful benchmark resource for the future development and assessment of cross-language text reuse detection systems for the English-Urdu language pair.