In this paper we highlight the main challenges in building a lexical database for Kurdish, a resource-scarce and diverse language. We also report on our effort in building the first prototype of KurdNet – the Kurdish WordNet– along with a preliminary evaluation of its impact on Kurdish information retrieval.

In October 2005, the authors organized a workshop in Sofia Bulgaria for prominent members of the Turkish academy and NGO community. At the workshop, several scenarios detailing how the Kurdish question in Turkey might evolve over the next 10-15 years were discussed. The article draws on those discussions to present and analyze a series of scenarios on the Kurdish question in Turkey. A scenario ...

beta-Thalassemia is a hereditary disease caused by any of 90 different point mutations in the beta-globin gene. Specific populations generally carry a small number of mutations, the most common of which are those that are widely distributed regionally. The present study constitutes an extensive molecular characterization of this disease in a small, highly inbred ethnic group with a high inciden...

Genetic variation among the individuals is considered as an important tool for conservation of livestock animals. This study was conducted to analyze the genetic variation, phylogenetic relationship and paternal lineages among Iranian dog populations using seventeen autosomal and Y chromosome-specific microsatellite markers. Total DNAs of the samples were extracted and applied for genotype anal...

During recent decades, recognizing letters was a considerable discussion for artificial intelligence researchers and recognize letters due to the variety of languages and different approaches have many challenges. The Artificial Neural Networks (ANNs) are framed based on particular application such as recognition pattern and data classification through learning process is configured. So, it is ...

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...