# Central Kurdish machine translation: First large scale parallel corpus and experiments

arXiv: https://arxiv.org/abs/2106.09325 · HTML: https://mlsanity.com/paper/2106.09325/

## Key facts

- Cited by 4 papers in the map (data through 14 Oct 2026).
- Builds on 9 of its 26 references that are in the map.
- First posted on arXiv 17 Jun 2021.

## Builds on (most cited first, 9 of 9)

- [When and Why are Pre-trained Word Embeddings Useful for Neural Machine Translation?](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1804.06323/) (2018)
- [OpenNMT: Neural Machine Translation Toolkit](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1805.11462/) (2018)
- [Overcoming the Curse of Sentence Length for Neural Machine Translation using Automatic Segmentation](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1409.1257/) (2014)
- [Igbo-English Machine Translation: An Evaluation Benchmark](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2004.00648/) (2020)
- [Leveraging Multilingual News Websites for Building a Kurdish Parallel Corpus](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2010.01554/) (2020)
- [Towards Finite-State Morphology of Kurdish](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2005.10652/) (2020)
- [Bianet: A Parallel News Corpus in Turkish, Kurdish and English](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1805.05095/) (2018)
- [Neural Machine Translation for Low-Resourced Indian Languages](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2004.13819/) (2020)
- [Jira: a Kurdish Speech Recognition System Designing and Building Speech Corpus and Pronunciation Lexicon](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2102.07412/) (2021)

## Built on by (most cited first, 4 of 4)

- [Language and Speech Technology for Central Kurdish Varieties](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2403.01983/) (2024)
- [Idiom Detection in Sorani Kurdish Texts](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2501.14528/) (2025)
- [Shifting from endangerment to rebirth in the Artificial Intelligence Age: An Ensemble Machine Learning Approach for Hawrami Text Classification](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2409.16884/) (2024)
- [English to Central Kurdish Speech Translation: Corpus Creation, Evaluation, and Orthographic Standardization](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2604.00613/) (2026)

## Abstract (arXiv)

While the computational processing of Kurdish has experienced a relative increase, the machine translation of this language seems to be lacking a considerable body of scientific work. This is in part due to the lack of resources especially curated for this task. In this paper, we present the first large scale parallel corpus of Central Kurdish-English, Awta, containing 229,222 pairs of manually aligned translations. Our corpus is collected from different text genres and domains in an attempt to build more robust and real-world applications of machine translation. We make a portion of this corpus publicly available in order to foster research in this area. Further, we build several neural machine translation models in order to benchmark the task of Kurdish machine translation. Additionally, we perform extensive experimental analysis of results in order to identify the major challenges that Central Kurdish machine translation faces. These challenges include language-dependent and-independent ones as categorized in this paper, the first group of which are aware of Central Kurdish linguistic properties on different morphological, syntactic and semantic levels. Our best performing systems achieve 22.72 and 16.81 in BLEU score for KurightarrowEN and EnrightarrowKu, respectively.