{
  "abstract": "Questions about Islamic law need exact answers with sources. A wrong citation is a serious failure. Retrieval-augmented generation (RAG) fits this need, but Urdu is a low-resource language and there is little guidance for building such a system. This paper reviews the design choices behind an Urdu Fatawa RAG system and proposes a reference architecture. We compare Urdu-capable language models, embedding models, tokenizer cost, vector databases, primary data stores, and backend frameworks against four requirements: faithfulness to sources, precision on close jurisprudential terms, Urdu fluency, and private self-hosting. We argue for chunk-level storage of question-answer pairs, hybrid dense and sparse retrieval fused by reciprocal rank fusion, a prompt with English instructions and an Urdu output example, and a three-container deployment that separates inference, vector search, and the API. Our choices rest on published benchmarks, not on a controlled comparison on our own corpus, and some remain hypotheses. We state which ones, and we give an evaluation plan.",
  "abstract_shown": true,
  "affiliations": [],
  "article_type": null,
  "arxiv": null,
  "author_total": 1,
  "authors": [
    {
      "name": "Abis Hussain"
    }
  ],
  "bibtex": "https://research.draconitic.com/paper/61hsn801ar5y1.bib",
  "cited_by": 0,
  "doi": "10.5281/zenodo.23560150",
  "fulltext_url": null,
  "id": "61hsn801ar5y1",
  "issns": [],
  "landing_url": "https://zenodo.org/records/23560150",
  "language": "eng",
  "licence": "CC-BY-4.0",
  "licence_label": "CC BY 4.0",
  "licence_source": "article",
  "licence_url": "https://creativecommons.org/licenses/by/4.0/",
  "metadata_licence": null,
  "native_subjects": [],
  "openalex": null,
  "pdf_url": "https://zenodo.org/api/records/23560150/files/urdu_rag_preprint.pdf/content",
  "pmcid": null,
  "pmid": null,
  "published": "2026-10-22",
  "publisher": null,
  "ris": "https://research.draconitic.com/paper/61hsn801ar5y1.ris",
  "sources": [
    {
      "first_seen": "2026-11-05T12:20:39Z",
      "native_id": "23560150",
      "source": "zenodo",
      "url": "https://zenodo.org/records/23560150"
    }
  ],
  "subjects": [],
  "title": "Retrieval-Augmented Generation for Urdu Islamic Jurisprudence: A Review of Design Choices and a Reference Architecture",
  "title_text": "Retrieval-Augmented Generation for Urdu Islamic Jurisprudence: A Review of Design Choices and a Reference Architecture",
  "type": "preprint",
  "updated_at": "2026-11-05T12:20:39Z",
  "url": "https://research.draconitic.com/paper/61hsn801ar5y1",
  "venue": "Zenodo",
  "versions": []
}