# Language and Speech Technology for Central Kurdish Varieties

arXiv: https://arxiv.org/abs/2403.01983 · HTML: https://mlsanity.com/paper/2403.01983/

## Key facts

- Cited by 5 papers in the map (data through 14 Oct 2026).
- Builds on 18 of its 54 references that are in the map.
- First posted on arXiv 4 Mar 2024.

## Builds on (most cited first, 18 of 18)

- [A Call for Clarity in Reporting BLEU Scores](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1804.08771/) (2018)
- [Enriching Word Vectors with Subword Information](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1607.04606/) (2016)
- [fairseq: A Fast, Extensible Toolkit for Sequence Modeling](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1904.01038/) (2019)
- [Common Voice: A Massively-Multilingual Speech Corpus](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1912.06670/) (2019)
- [No Language Left Behind: Scaling Human-Centered Machine Translation](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2207.04672/) (2022)
- [Subword Regularization: Improving Neural Network Translation Models with Multiple Subword Candidates](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1804.10959/) (2018)
- [Multi-VALUE: A Framework for Cross-Dialectal English NLP](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2212.08011/) (2022)
- [Improving Robustness of Machine Translation with Synthetic Noise](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1902.09508/) (2019)
- [What to do about non-standard (or non-canonical) language in NLP](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1608.07836/) (2016)
- [Leveraging Multilingual News Websites for Building a Kurdish Parallel Corpus](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2010.01554/) (2020)
- [CODET: A Benchmark for Contrastive Dialectal Evaluation of Machine Translation](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2305.17267/) (2023)
- [PALI: A Language Identification Benchmark for Perso-Arabic Scripts](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2304.01322/) (2023)
- [Towards Machine Translation for the Kurdish Language](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2010.06041/) (2020)
- [Bianet: A Parallel News Corpus in Turkish, Kurdish and English](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1805.05095/) (2018)
- [Central Kurdish machine translation: First large scale parallel corpus and experiments](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2106.09325/) (2021)
- [A Formal Description of Sorani Kurdish Morphology](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2109.03942/) (2021)
- [Approaches to Corpus Creation for Low-Resource Language Technology: the Case of Southern Kurdish and Laki](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2304.01319/) (2023)
- [Script Normalization for Unconventional Writing of Under-Resourced Languages in Bilingual Communities](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2305.16407/) (2023)

## Built on by (most cited first, 5 of 5)

- [Voices Unheard: NLP Resources and Models for Yor`ub'a Regional Dialects](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2406.19564/) (2024)
- [Speaker Diarization for Low-Resource Languages Through Wav2vec Fine-Tuning](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2504.18582/) (2025)
- [KurdSTS: The Kurdish Semantic Textual Similarity](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2510.02336/) (2025)
- [FLEURS-Kobani: Extending the FLEURS Dataset for Northern Kurdish](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2603.29892/) (2026)
- [Unadapted Multilingual ASR on a Garrusi Kurdish Evaluation Set: A Common-Reference Staged Normalization Analysis](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2608.16379/) (2026)

## Abstract (arXiv)

Kurdish, an Indo-European language spoken by over 30 million speakers, is considered a dialect continuum and known for its diversity in language varieties. Previous studies addressing language and speech technology for Kurdish handle it in a monolithic way as a macro-language, resulting in disparities for dialects and varieties for which there are few resources and tools available. In this paper, we take a step towards developing resources for language and speech technology for varieties of Central Kurdish, creating a corpus by transcribing movies and TV series as an alternative to fieldwork. Additionally, we report the performance of machine translation, automatic speech recognition, and language identification as downstream tasks evaluated on Central Kurdish varieties. Data and models are publicly available under an open license at https://github.com/sinaahmadi/CORDI.