A corpus of the Sorani Kurdish folkloric lyrics

Ahmadi, Sina, Hassani, Hossein, & Abedi, Kamaladdin. (2020). A corpus of the Sorani Kurdish folkloric lyrics. Paper presented at the 1st Joint Spoken Language Technologies for Under-resourced languages (SLTU) and Collaboration and Computing for Under-Resourced Languages (CCURL) Workshop at the12th International Conference on Language Resources and Evaluation (LREC), Marseille, France (11-16 May).

Abstract

Kurdish poetry and prose narratives were historically transmitted orally and less in a written form. Being an essential medium of oral narration and literature, Kurdish lyrics have had a unique attribute in becoming a vital resource for different types of studies, including Digital Humanities, Computational Folkloristics and Computational Linguistics. As an initial study of its kind for the Kurdish language, this paper presents our efforts in transcribing and collecting Kurdish folk lyrics as a corpus that covers various Kurdish musical genres, in particular Beyt, Goranˆı, Bend, and Heyran. We believe that this corpus contributes to Kurdish language processing in several ways, such as compensation for the lack of a long history of written text by incorporating oral literature, presenting an unexplored realm in Kurdish language processing, and assisting the initiation of Kurdish computational folkloristics. Our corpus contains 49,582 tokens in the Sorani dialect of Kurdish. The corpus is publicly available in the Text Encoding Initiative (TEI) format for non-commercial use under the CC BY-NC-SA 4.0 license at https://github.com/KurdishBLARK/KurdishLyricsCorpus.

Publisher

National University of Ireland Galway

Rights

Attribution-NonCommercial-NoDerivs 3.0 Ireland

cbn

Collections

Data Science Institute (Workshop Papers)