Towards Machine Translation for the Kurdish Language

Sina Ahmadi, Maraim Masoud


Abstract
Machine translation is the task of translating texts from one language to another using computers. It has been one of the major tasks in natural language processing and computational linguistics and has been motivating to facilitate human communication. Kurdish, an Indo-European language, has received little attention in this realm due to the language being less-resourced. Therefore, in this paper, we are addressing the main issues in creating a machine translation system for the Kurdish language, with a focus on the Sorani dialect. We describe the available scarce parallel data suitable for training a neural machine translation model for Sorani Kurdish-English translation. We also discuss some of the major challenges in Kurdish language translation and demonstrate how fundamental text processing tasks, such as tokenization, can improve translation performance.
Anthology ID:
2020.loresmt-1.12
Volume:
Proceedings of the 3rd Workshop on Technologies for MT of Low Resource Languages
Month:
December
Year:
2020
Address:
Suzhou, China
Venues:
AACL | loresmt
SIG:
Publisher:
Association for Computational Linguistics
Note:
Pages:
87–98
Language:
URL:
https://aclanthology.org/2020.loresmt-1.12
DOI:
Bibkey:
Cite (ACL):
Sina Ahmadi and Maraim Masoud. 2020. Towards Machine Translation for the Kurdish Language. In Proceedings of the 3rd Workshop on Technologies for MT of Low Resource Languages, pages 87–98, Suzhou, China. Association for Computational Linguistics.
Cite (Informal):
Towards Machine Translation for the Kurdish Language (Ahmadi & Masoud, loresmt 2020)
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PDF:
https://preview.aclanthology.org/update-css-js/2020.loresmt-1.12.pdf
Code
 sinaahmadi/KurdishMT