One of the major challenges that under-represented and endangered language communities face in language technology is the lack or paucity of language data. This is also the case of the Southern varieties of the Kurdish and Laki languages for which very limited resources are available with insubstantial progress in tools. To tackle this, we provide a few approaches that rely on the content of local news websites, a local radio station that broadcasts content in Southern Kurdish and fieldwork for Laki. In this paper, we describe some of the challenges of such under-represented languages, particularly in writing and standardization, and also, in retrieving sources of data and retro-digitizing handwritten content to create a corpus for Southern Kurdish and Laki. In addition, we study the task of language identification in light of the other variants of Kurdish and Zaza-Gorani languages.

Using rooted, directed and labeled graphs, Abstract Meaning Representation (AMR) abstracts away from syntactic features such as word order and does not annotate every constituent in a sentence. AMR has been specified for English and was not supposed to be an Interlingua. However, several studies strived to overcome divergences in the annotations between English AMRs and those of their target languages by refining the annotation specification. Following this line of research, we have started to build the first Turkish AMR corpus by hand-annotating 100 sentences of the Turkish translation of the novel “The Little Prince” and comparing the results with the English AMRs available for the same corpus. The next step is to prepare the Turkish AMR annotation specification for training future annotators.