The First Parallel Corpora for Kurdish Sign Language
Zina Kamal Hossein Hassani
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/).