English to Central Kurdish Speech Translation: Corpus Creation, Evaluation, and Orthographic Standardization
Mohammad Mohammadamini, Daban Q. Jaff, Josep Crego, Marie Tahon, Antoine Laurent · Apr 1, 2026 · Citations: 0
How to use this page
Low trustUse this as background context only. Do not make protocol decisions from this page alone.
Best use
Background context only
What to verify
Validate the evaluation procedure and quality controls in the full paper before operational use.
Evidence quality
Low
Derived from extracted protocol signals and abstract evidence.
Abstract
We present KUTED, a speech-to-text translation (S2TT) dataset for Central Kurdish, derived from TED and TEDx talks. The corpus comprises 91,000 sentence pairs, including 170 hours of English audio, 1.65 million English tokens, and 1.40 million Central Kurdish tokens. We evaluate KUTED on the S2TT task and find that orthographic variation significantly degrades Kurdish translation performance, producing nonstandard outputs. To address this, we propose a systematic text standardization approach that yields substantial performance gains and more consistent translations. On a test set separated from TED talks, a fine-tuned Seamless model achieves 15.18 BLEU, and we improve Seamless baseline by 3.0 BLEU on the FLEURS benchmark. We also train a Transformer model from scratch and evaluate a cascaded system that combines Seamless (ASR) with NLLB (MT).