Creating a fine-grained corpus for a less-resourced language: the case of Kurdish

Kurdish is a less-resourced language consisting of different dialects written in various scripts. Approximately 30 million people in different countries speak the language. The lack of corpora is one of the main obstacles in Kurdish language processing. In this paper, we present KTC the Kurdish Textbooks Corpus, which is composed of 31 K-12 textbooks in Sorani dialect. The corpus is normalized and categorized into 12 educational subjects containing 693,800 tokens (110,297 types). Our resource is publicly available for non-commercial use under the CC BY-NC-SA 4.0 license.We would like to appreciate the generous assistance of the Ministry of Education of the Kurdistan Region of Iraq, particularly the General Directorate of Curriculum and Printing, for providing us with the data for the KTC corpus. Our special gratitude goes to Ms. Namam Jalal Rasheed and Mr. Kawa Omer Muhammad for their assistance in making the required data available and resolving of the copyright issues.2019-07-2