Kurdish Interdialect Machine Translation

Hossein Hassani
2017 Proceedings of the Fourth Workshop on NLP for Similar Languages, Varieties and Dialects (VarDial)  
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
more » ... wed 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.
doi:10.18653/v1/w17-1208 dblp:conf/vardial/Hassani17 fatcat:swg3su7e5jahfk4b34r7nlsooy