Abstract

The resources and technologies for Sign language processing of resourceful languages are emerging, while the low-resource languages are falling behind. Kurdish is a multi-dialect language, and it is considered a low-resource language. It is spoken by approximately 30 million people in several countries, which denotes that it has a large community with hearing-impairments as well. This paper reports on a project which aims to develop the necessary data and tools to process the Sign language for Sorani as one of the spoken Kurdish dialects. We present the results of developing a dataset in HamNoSys and its corresponding SiGML form for the Kurdish Sign lexicon. We use this dataset to implement a sign-supported Kurdish tool to check the accuracy of the Sign lexicon. We tested the tool by presenting it to hearing-impaired individuals. The experiment showed that 100% of the translated letters were understandable by a hearing-impaired person. The percentages were 65% for isolated words, and approximately 30% for the words in sentences. The data is publicly available at https://github.com/KurdishBLARK/KurdishSignLanguage for non-commercial use under the CC BY-NC-SA 4.0 licence