Transformer-Based Neural Network Machine Translation Model for the Kurdish Sorani Dialect

Abstract

The transformer model is one of the most recently developed models for translating texts into another language. The model uses the principle of attention mechanism, surpassing previous models, such as sequence-to-sequence, in terms of performance. It performed well with highly resourced English, French, and German languages. Using the model architecture, we investigate training the modified version of the model in a low-resourced language such as the Kurdish language. This paper presents the first-ever transformer-based neural machine translation model for the Kurdish language by utilizing vocabulary dictionary units that share vocabulary across the dataset. For this purpose, we combine all the existing parallel corpora of Kurdish – English by building a large corpus and training it on the proposed transformer model. The outcome indicated that the suggested transformer model works well with Kurdish texts by scoring (0.45) on bilingual evaluation understudy (BLEU). According to the BLEU standard, the score indicates a high-quality translation.