Despite having a large number of speakers, the Kurdish language is among the less-resourced languages. In this work we highlight the challenges and problems in providing the required tools and techniques for processing texts written in Kurdish. From a high-level perspective, the main challenges are: the inherent diversity of the language, standardization and segmentation issues, and the lack of...

This paper describes the development of the first syntactically annotated corpus of Kurmanji Kurdish. The corpus was used as one of the surprise languages in the 2017 CoNLL shared task on parsing Universal Dependencies. In the paper we describe how the corpus was prepared, some Kurmanji specific constructions that required special treatment, and we give results for parsing Kurdish using two pop...

Hereditary cancer comprises more than 10% of all breast cancer cases. In patients with a family history suggestive of a hereditary component, a mutation is often identified in the high penetrant genes BRCA1 and BRCA2. Several founder mutations have been detected in some Jewish communities, yet no BRCA1/2 founder mutation had been known in Kurdish Jews. Here, we describe the validation of a 22 h...

PURPOSE Hormone receptor (HR) status is a prognostic factor in women with breast cancer and differs among different ethnic groups. HR status among Turkish, Kurdish and Arabic women with breast cancer living in Turkey is unknown and in this study we investigated the relationship between HR and HER2 status and race. METHODS FA total of 648 women with breast cancer (Turkish 438, Kurdish 174, Ara...

German-Kurdish cultural organizations and the Kurdish Diaspora they represent offer an example of a new type of actor in defining globalization. This paper examines how such organizations act as the lynchpin in transnational networks and how such organizations give a voice to Berliner-Kurds. These relationships are explored at the national, regional, and organizational level, in order to paint ...

The left-wing Kurdistan Workers’ Party (PKK) began its violent insurgency campaign against the Turkish state in 1984, claiming that an independent Kurdistan should exist. However, the origins of this conflict can be traced back even further – to the inception of the Turkish Republic in 1923. This thesis begins by investigating the history of how the conflict between the Kurdish and Turkish poli...

BACKGROUND From 1986-9, the Kurdish population of Iraqi Kurdistan was subjected to an intense campaign of military action, and genocide by the central Iraq government. This campaign, referred to as the Anfal, included systematic attacks consisting of aerial bombings, mass deportation, imprisonment, torture, and chemical warfare. It has been estimated that around 200,000 Kurdish people disappear...

This research suggests a method for machine translation among two Kurdish dialects. We chose the two widely spoken dialects, Kurmanji and Sorani, which are considered to be mutually unintelligible. Also, despite being spoken by about 30 million people in different countries, Kurdish is among less-resourced languages. The research used bi-dialectal dictionaries and showed that the lack of parall...