Named Entity Recognition for Linguistic Rapid Response in Low-Resource Languages: Sorani Kurdish and Tajik

This paper describes our construction of named-entity recognition (NER) systems in two Western Iranian languages, Sorani Kurdish and Tajik, as a part of a pilot study of Linguistic Rapid Response to potential emergency humanitarian relief situations. In the absence of large annotated corpora, parallel corpora, treebanks, bilingual lexica, etc., we found the following to be effective: exploiting distributional regularities in monolingual data, projecting information across closely related languages, and utilizing human linguist judgments. We show promising results on both a four-month exercise in Sorani and a two-day exercise in Tajik, achieved with minimal annotation costs.