Last updated on April 30th, 2023 (Check out the new goals for 2023)

Dem baş! 🙂

Thanks for visiting my sponsor page! It's great that you want to help contribute to the open-source community to develop language technology for under-represented languages, including the Kurdish language.

Who am I?

I am a language lover, a self-taught linguist, a computer science formal learner, and an occasional teacher. Since I started my Bachelor's in 2010, I have been involved in many natural language processing projects, mostly on less-resourced languages, particularly within the Kurdish Language Processing Project and the Kurdish Basic Language Resource Kit. I enjoy very much working on languages and developing tools and resources to analyze them. One of the projects that I am proud of is KLPT-the Kurdish language processing toolkit which facilitates basic language processing tasks for the Sorani and Kurmanji dialects of Kurdish. The toolkit is openly available for commercial and non-commercial uses.

Why should you support Kurdish language processing (KLP)?

Every language has certain unique features and ways of thinking which will be gradually forgotten or even die, if not documented. The current revolution that we are living with information technology makes computers an inevitable element to preserve languages and empower speakers to communicate efficiently. the Kurdish language is a less-resourced language that has not received much attention in the NLP realm. However, I am convinced and determined to change this situation and that is currently only feasible by open-source volunteer-based projects.

Sponsor my projects!

I used to work in this field as an independent researcher during my university studies (Started B.Eng. in 2010 & finished my Ph.D. in 2022) with no financial support. All my previous projects have been done over weekends or late nights. For example, developing the Kurdish morphological analyzer and spell-checker for Sorani took me over a year and almost three months of full-time work!

However, things have changed recently:
1) Since I am a full-time researcher and adjunct lecturer now, I have much less time for side projects.
2) The Kurdish community of developers is much more up-to-date than a few years ago. So much potential out there!
3) Awareness has been raised regarding language technology for Kurdish.

And some things have not changed at all, especially since there is no financial support or investment in the field. Meanwhile, I have many ideas and projects that have been on my to-do list without being solved over the years! To solve this, I want you to become one of my projects sponsor. This way, if I don't have the time to do a project, I can instead pay one of the many brilliant Kurdish developers to work on the problem. And this will be all in your name. In other words, you can buy a whole project while keeping it open!

Here are some of the projects and a rough estimate of the required budget:

• [x] Kurdish Hunspell for both Sorani and Kurmanji | almost 1000$ was collected from 2020 to 2022 | Progress 100% | Thanks to the sponsors 🤗)

• [x] Kurdish XeLaTeX | 2020 | Progress 100%

• [ ] Kurdish Computational Linguistics course: sponsor lectures individually or the whole course | 2022- | Progress: 50%

• [ ] Kurdish Varieties and Dialects: documentation & developing basic NLP tools | 2021-

• [ ] Treebanks for Kurdish

• [ ] Create an online website for KLPT

• [ ] Extend KLPT to use neural models

• [ ] Create technologies for the languages of the Middle East

Is any project of interest to you? Sponsor it. Even a trivial donation will make a difference. You'll get full credit for your support.

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Many thanks and hugs to my current and previous sponsors:

• and those who preferred to keep their generosity anonymously

Find more about me at https://sinaahmadi.github.io/.