Kurdish Interdialect Machine Translation

Hossein Hassani


Abstract
This research suggests a method for machine translation among two Kurdish dialects. We chose the two widely spoken dialects, Kurmanji and Sorani, which are considered to be mutually unintelligible. Also, despite being spoken by about 30 million people in different countries, Kurdish is among less-resourced languages. The research used bi-dialectal dictionaries and showed that the lack of parallel corpora is not a major obstacle in machine translation between the two dialects. The experiments showed that the machine translated texts are comprehensible to those who do not speak the dialect. The research is the first attempt for inter-dialect machine translation in Kurdish and particularly could help in making online texts in one dialect comprehensible to those who only speak the target dialect. The results showed that the translated texts are in 71% and 79% cases rated as understandable for Kurmanji and Sorani respectively. They are rated as slightly-understandable in 29% cases for Kurmanji and 21% for Sorani.
Anthology ID:
W17-1208
Volume:
Proceedings of the Fourth Workshop on NLP for Similar Languages, Varieties and Dialects (VarDial)
Month:
April
Year:
2017
Address:
Valencia, Spain
Editors:
Preslav Nakov, Marcos Zampieri, Nikola Ljubešić, Jörg Tiedemann, Shevin Malmasi, Ahmed Ali
Venue:
VarDial
SIG:
Publisher:
Association for Computational Linguistics
Note:
Pages:
63–72
Language:
URL:
https://aclanthology.org/W17-1208
DOI:
10.18653/v1/W17-1208
Bibkey:
Cite (ACL):
Hossein Hassani. 2017. Kurdish Interdialect Machine Translation. In Proceedings of the Fourth Workshop on NLP for Similar Languages, Varieties and Dialects (VarDial), pages 63–72, Valencia, Spain. Association for Computational Linguistics.
Cite (Informal):
Kurdish Interdialect Machine Translation (Hassani, VarDial 2017)
Copy Citation:
PDF:
https://aclanthology.org/W17-1208.pdf