Subdialectal Differences in Sorani Kurdish
Shervin Malmasi · International Conference on Computational Linguistics · 2016
In this study we apply classification methods for detecting subdialectal differences in Sorani Kurdish texts produced in different regions, namely Iran and Iraq. As Sorani is a low-resource language, no corpus including texts from different regions was readily available. To this end, we identified data sources that could be leveraged for this task to create a dataset of 200,000 sentences. Using surface features, we attempted to classify Sorani subdialects, showing that sentences from news sources in Iraq and Iran are distinguishable with 96% accuracy. This is the first preliminary study for a dialect that has not been widely studied in computational linguistics, evidencing the possible existence of distinct subdialects.