Automatic dialect identification is a necessary Language Technology for processing multidialect languages in which the dialects are linguistically far from each other. Particularly, this becomes crucial where the dialects are mutually unintelligible. Therefore, to perform computational activities on these languages, the system needs to identify the dialect that is the subject of the process. Ku...

The Kurdish language is an Indo-European language spoken in Kurdistan, a large geographical region in the Middle East. Despite having a large number of speakers, Kurdish is among the less-resourced languages and has not seen much attention from the IR and NLP research communities. This paper reports on the outcomes of a project aimed at providing essential resources for processing Kurdish texts...

In September 2017, the Kurdistan Regional Government of Iraq held a referendum for independence despite high likelihood heavy retaliation. contrast to narrative that presents decision as result gross miscalculation, this article offers an alternative explanation highlighting role played by Kurdish nationalism in upholding structures power region. The current class structure, institutional frame...

Resource scarcity along with diversity –in both dialect and script– are the two primary challenges in Kurdish language processing. In this paper we aim at addressing these two problems by building stemmers for the two main dialects of the Kurdish language (i.e. Sorani and Kurmanji) and investigate their effectiveness on Kurdish Information Retrieval. More specifically, we build Jedar, the first...

In order to investigate the origins and relationships of Kurdish-speaking groups, mtDNA HV1 sequences, eleven Y chromosome bi-allelic markers, and 9 Y-STR loci were analyzed among three Kurdish groups: Zazaki and Kurmanji speakers from Turkey, and Kurmanji speakers from Georgia. When compared with published data from other Kurdish groups and from European, Caucasian, and West and Central Asian ...

In this paper we highlight the main challenges in building a lexical database for Kurdish, a resource-scarce and diverse language. We also report on our effort in building the first prototype of KurdNet – the Kurdish WordNet– along with a preliminary evaluation of its impact on Kurdish information retrieval.

In October 2005, the authors organized a workshop in Sofia Bulgaria for prominent members of the Turkish academy and NGO community. At the workshop, several scenarios detailing how the Kurdish question in Turkey might evolve over the next 10-15 years were discussed. The article draws on those discussions to present and analyze a series of scenarios on the Kurdish question in Turkey. A scenario ...

The purpose of this article is to cast some light on the question as why and how nationalism appeared rather suddenly on the political stage in Turkey at the beginning of the 20 th century. This article asserts that Turkish nationalism was an answer to the particular historical conditions that characterised the final phases of the Ottoman Empire and the birth of the modern Turkey. This article ...