Language and Speech Technology for Central Kurdish Varieties
This work addresses the problem of resource scarcity for Central Kurdish dialects, benefiting speakers and researchers, but is incremental as it builds on existing methods for a specific domain.
The paper tackled the lack of language and speech technology resources for Central Kurdish varieties by creating a corpus from transcribed movies and TV series, and reported performance on machine translation, automatic speech recognition, and language identification tasks, with data and models made publicly available.
Kurdish, an Indo-European language spoken by over 30 million speakers, is considered a dialect continuum and known for its diversity in language varieties. Previous studies addressing language and speech technology for Kurdish handle it in a monolithic way as a macro-language, resulting in disparities for dialects and varieties for which there are few resources and tools available. In this paper, we take a step towards developing resources for language and speech technology for varieties of Central Kurdish, creating a corpus by transcribing movies and TV series as an alternative to fieldwork. Additionally, we report the performance of machine translation, automatic speech recognition, and language identification as downstream tasks evaluated on Central Kurdish varieties. Data and models are publicly available under an open license at https://github.com/sinaahmadi/CORDI.