# Idiom Detection in Sorani Kurdish Texts

arXiv: https://arxiv.org/abs/2501.14528 · HTML: https://mlsanity.com/paper/2501.14528/

## Key facts

- Cited by 1 papers in the map (data through 14 Oct 2026).
- Builds on 2 of its 34 references that are in the map.
- First posted on arXiv 24 Jan 2025.

## Builds on (most cited first, 2 of 2)

- [BERT: Pre-training of Deep Bidirectional Transformers for Language Understanding](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1810.04805/) (2018)
- [Central Kurdish machine translation: First large scale parallel corpus and experiments](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2106.09325/) (2021)

## Built on by (most cited first, 1 of 1)

- [Idiom Understanding as a Tool to Measure the Dialect Gap](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2510.05026/) (2025)

## Abstract (arXiv)

Idiom detection using Natural Language Processing (NLP) is the computerized process of recognizing figurative expressions within a text that convey meanings beyond the literal interpretation of the words. While idiom detection has seen significant progress across various languages, the Kurdish language faces a considerable research gap in this area despite the importance of idioms in tasks like machine translation and sentiment analysis. This study addresses idiom detection in Sorani Kurdish by approaching it as a text classification task using deep learning techniques. To tackle this, we developed a dataset containing 10,580 sentences embedding 101 Sorani Kurdish idioms across diverse contexts. Using this dataset, we developed and evaluated three deep learning models: KuBERT-based transformer sequence classification, a Recurrent Convolutional Neural Network (RCNN), and a BiLSTM model with an attention mechanism. The evaluations revealed that the transformer model, the fine-tuned BERT, consistently outperformed the others, achieving nearly 99% accuracy while the RCNN achieved 96.5% and the BiLSTM 80%. These results highlight the effectiveness of Transformer-based architectures in low-resource languages like Kurdish. This research provides a dataset, three optimized models, and insights into idiom detection, laying a foundation for advancing Kurdish NLP.