The First Parallel Corpora for Kurdish Sign Language
This work addresses the problem of language accessibility for Kurdish Deaf people by enabling avatar-based translation, though it is incremental as it applies existing SMT methods to a new language pair.
The authors tackled automatic translation between spoken Kurdish (Sorani dialect) and Kurdish Sign Language (KuSL) by developing the first parallel corpora for this pair and training a Statistical Machine Translation engine, achieving 53.8% BLEU accuracy, which is notably high compared to prior work.
Kurdish Sign Language (KuSL) is the natural language of the Kurdish Deaf people. We work on automatic translation between spoken Kurdish and KuSL. Sign languages evolve rapidly and follow grammatical rules that differ from spoken languages. Consequently,those differences should be considered during any translation. We proposed an avatar-based automatic translation of Kurdish texts in the Sorani (Central Kurdish) dialect into the Kurdish Sign language. We developed the first parallel corpora for that pair that we use to train a Statistical Machine Translation (SMT) engine. We tested the outcome understandability and evaluated it using the Bilingual Evaluation Understudy (BLEU). Results showed 53.8% accuracy. Compared to the previous experiments in the field, the result is considerably high. We suspect the reason to be the similarity between the structure of the two pairs. We plan to make the resources publicly available under CC BY-NC-SA 4.0 license on the Kurdish-BLARK (https://kurdishblark.github.io/).