A Tokenization System for the Kurdish Language

AbstractTokenization is one of the essential and fundamental tasks in natural language processing. Despite the recent advances in applying unsupervised statistical methods for this task, every language with its writing system and orthography represents specific challenges that should be addressed individually. In this paper, as a preliminary study of its kind, we propose an approach for the tokenization of the Sorani and Kurmanji dialects of Kurdish using a lexicon and a morphological analyzer. We demonstrate how the morphological complexity of the language along with the lack of a unified orthography can be efficiently addressed in tokenization. We also develop an annotated dataset for which our approach outperforms the performance of unsupervised methods.