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CKMorph: a comprehensive morphological analyzer for Central Kurdish

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Abstract

A morphological analyzer, a significant component of many natural language processing applications, especially for morphologically rich languages, divides an input word into all its composing morphemes and identifies their morphological roles. This paper introduces a comprehensive morphological analyzer for Central Kurdish (CK), also known as Sorani, a low-resourced language with rich morphology. Building upon the limited existing literature, we first assembled and systematically categorized an extensive collection of the morphological and morphophonological rules of the language. Additionally, we collected and manually labeled a generative lexicon containing nearly 10,000 verb, noun and adjective stems, named entities, and other types of word stems. We used these rule sets and resources to implement CKMorph Analyzer based on finite-state transducers. In order to provide a benchmark for future research, we collected, manually labeled, and publicly shared test sets for evaluating the accuracy and coverage of the analyzer. CKMorph was able to correctly analyze 95.9% of the first test set, containing 1000 CK words morphologically analyzed according to the context. Moreover, CKMorph gave at least one analysis for 95.5% of 4.22 M CK tokens of the second test set. The demonstration of the application and resources, including the CK verb database and test sets, are openly accessible at github.com/CKMorph.

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Data availability

The resources including the Central Kurdish verb database (https://doi.org/10.5281/zenodo.6300522) and evaluation data sets (https://doi.org/10.5281/zenodo.6300602) are publicly accessible in CKMorph’s project’s repository at github.com/CKMorph.

Notes

  1. http://hunspell.github.io/.

  2. https://github.com/unimorph/ckb

  3. Available at https://github.com/AsoSoft/AsoSoft-Text-Corpus

  4. https://github.com/CKMorph/Evaluations

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Authors and Affiliations

  1. Sharif University of Technology, Tehran, Iran

    Morteza Naserzade

  2. University of Tehran, Tehran, Iran

    Aso Mahmudi & Hadi Veisi

  3. Ryerson University, Toronto, Canada

    Hawre Hosseini

  4. Avignon University, Avignon, France

    Mohammad MohammadAmini

Authors
  1. Morteza Naserzade
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  2. Aso Mahmudi
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  3. Hadi Veisi
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  4. Hawre Hosseini
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  5. Mohammad MohammadAmini
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Correspondence to Hadi Veisi.

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Naserzade, M., Mahmudi, A., Veisi, H. et al. CKMorph: a comprehensive morphological analyzer for Central Kurdish. Int J Digit Humanities 5, 187–232 (2023). https://doi.org/10.1007/s42803-022-00062-7

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