Language and Speech Technology for Central Kurdish Varieties
Sina Ahmadi Daban Q. Jaff Md Mahfuz Ibn Alam Antonios Anastasopoulos
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.