aranemini/northern-kurdish-raw-audio

Northern Kurdish Raw Audio Collection

Overview

This repository contains a large collection of raw Northern Kurdish (Kurmanji Kurdish) speech recordings gathered from publicly available Kurdish media sources.

The collection was assembled to support research and development in:

• Automatic Speech Recognition (ASR)
• Speech Translation (ST)
• Text-to-Speech (TTS)
• Self-supervised Learning (SSL)
• Spoken Language Understanding (SLU)

The dataset contains more than 2,000 hours of speech collected primarily from Kurdish media outlets such as Rudaw and Sterk TV.

Unlike audiobook corpora, the recordings mainly consist of spontaneous and semi-spontaneous speech, including interviews, discussions, talk shows, news reports, live broadcasts, cultural programs, and other naturally occurring spoken content. As a result, the dataset captures a wide range of speakers, speaking styles, accents, recording conditions, and conversational phenomena commonly encountered in real-world speech applications.

Important Notice

This dataset was collected for research and educational purposes.

We respect the rights of journalists, speakers, content creators, media organizations, publishers, and copyright holders.

If you are the owner of any content included in this repository, or a representative thereof, and you believe that any recording should not be distributed through this dataset, please contact:

emini.aran@gmail.com

Please include sufficient information to identify the relevant recording(s). We will review the request and remove the corresponding content when appropriate.

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Dataset Statistics

Statistic	Value
Language	Northern Kurdish (Kurmanji)
Total Speech Duration	> 2,000 hours
Data Type	Raw audio
Main Sources	Rudaw, Sterk TV
Speech Style	Predominantly spontaneous and semi-spontaneous speech

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Data Sources

The recordings were collected from publicly accessible Kurdish-language media platforms and broadcast archives, primarily Rudaw and Sterk TV.

The dataset includes a broad range of content such as:

• News broadcasts
• Interviews
• Political discussions
• Cultural programs
• Educational content
• Live events
• Talk shows
• Documentary programs

The repository contains raw audio only. No manual transcriptions or annotations are provided.

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Intended Uses

This dataset may be useful for:

• Self-supervised speech representation learning
• Automatic Speech Recognition (ASR)
• Speech Translation (ST)
• Low-resource language technology research

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Related Publications

If you use this dataset in academic work, please cite the following publications.

Interspeech 2025

@inproceedings{mohammadamini25_interspeech,
  title     = {Scaling pseudo-labeling data for end-to-end low-resource speech translation (the case of Kurdish language)},
  author    = {Mohammad Mohammadamini and Aghilas Sini and Marie Tahon and Antoine Laurent},
  year      = {2025},
  booktitle = {Interspeech 2025},
  pages     = {898--902},
  doi       = {10.21437/Interspeech.2025-887},
  issn      = {2958-1796},
}

JEP 2026

@inproceedings{mohammadamini:hal-05569943,
  TITLE = {Apprentissage de modèles frugaux pour les langues peu dotées à partir de larges modèles d'ASR},
  AUTHOR = {Mohammadamini, Mohammad and Tahon, Marie and Sini, Aghilas and Laurent, Antoine},
  URL = {https://hal.science/hal-05569943},
  BOOKTITLE = {JEP},
  ADDRESS = {Montpellier, France},
  ORGANIZATION = {AFCP},
  YEAR = {2026},
  MONTH = Jun
}