## 2 Materials and Methods
### Speech Dataset  
In this study, a novel Kurdish dataset was created and used. The speech corpus was a collection of speech recordings from Turkish Radio and the Television Corporation (TRT) Nuce news channel. For this study, the speech corpus was selected from different Kurdish sources, such as education news, culture news, art news, economy news, health news, and political news. The collected Kurdish voice samples of sentences and clauses of different lengths were taken from four male and three female speakers in the age group of 20-45 years. The speech sentences contained CV (consonant-vowel), VC (vowel-consonant), CVC (consonant-vowel-consonant), CCV (consonant-consonant-vowel), CVCC (consonant-vowel-consonant-consonant) and CCVCC (consonant-consonant-vowel-consonant-consonant) as different types of words. The recordings were performed in a quiet setting using a high-quality (low noise) desktop microphone at a sampling frequency of 44,100 Hz with 16-bit quantization and a mono-channel. Speech data were stored in the \"wav\" format. The whole speech corpus was randomly split into two parts: 66% for training, and the remaining 33% for testing the system.  
The phoneme segment detection method was implemented on the continuous Kurdish speech containing almost 6819 phonemes in total. Tables 2 and 3 present the dataset of phonemes from male and female speakers, respectively.  
\begin{table}
\begin{tabular}{c c c} \hline \hline
**Kurdish Letter** & **IPA** & **Phonetic Description** \\ \hline a & [\(\alpha\)] & Open, back, unrounded vowel \\ b & [b] & Bilabial voiced stop \\ c & [d\({}_{3}\)] & Palatal voiced afficate \\ c & [t\({}_{\text{f}}\)] & Palatal voicedness unaspirated affricate \\ d & [t\({}_{\text{f}}\)h] & Palatal voicedness aspirated affricate \\ d & [d] & Alveo-dental voiced stop \\ e & [ae] & Near-open, front, unrounded vowel \\ \(\varepsilon\) & [\(\varepsilon\)] & Open-mid, front, unrounded vowel \\ \(\varepsilon\) & [e] & Close-mid, front, unrounded vowel \\ \(\varepsilon\) & [o] & Mid-central unrounded vowel \\ f & [f] & Labiodental voiceless fricative \\ g & [g] & Velar voiced stop \\  & [h] & Glottal fricative \\ h & [\(h\)] & Pharyngeal fricative \\ i & [i] & Short, central, unrounded vowel \\ i & [i] & Close, front, unrounded vowel \\ j & [\({}_{3}\)] & Post-alveolar voiced fricative \\  & [k] & Velar voiceless unaspirated stop \\ k & [kh] & Velar voiceless aspirated stop \\ l & [l] & Alveo-dental lateral \\ m & [m] & Bilabial nasal stop \\ n & [n] & Alveo-dental nasal stop \\ o & [o] & Close-mid, back, rounded vowel \\  & [p] & Bilabial voiceless unaspirated stop \\ P & [ph] & Bilabial voiceless aspirated stop \\ q & [q] & Uvular voiceless stop \\ r & [r] & Alveolar trill \\ s & [s] & Alveolar voicedness fricative \\ \(\varepsilon\) & [f] & Post-alveolar voiceless fricative \\ t & [t] & Alveo-dental voiceless unaspirated stop \\ u & [u] & Near-close, slightly centralized rounded vowel \\ \(\hat{\text{u}}\) & [u] & Close, back, rounded vowel \\ v & [v] & Labiodental voiced fricative \\ w & [w] & Bilabial approximant \\ x & [x] & Velar voiceless fricative \\ y & [j] & Palatal approximant \\ z & [z] & Alveolar voiced fricative \\ \hline \hline \end{tabular}
\end{table}
Table 1: Phonemes of the Kurdish language [35; 36; 37].  
\begin{table}
\begin{tabular}{c c c c} \hline \hline
**Male Speakers** & **Phonemes** & **Vowel Phonemes** & **Consonant Phonemes** \\ \hline Male 1 & 1332 & 583 & 749 \\ Male 2 & 1096 & 469 & 627 \\ Male3 & 1100 & 462 & 638 \\ Male4 & 327 & 146 & 181 \\ \hline Total & 3855 & 1660 & 2195 \\ \hline \hline \end{tabular}
\end{table}
Table 2: Dataset from male speakers.