Abstract
Native Language Identification (NLI) is a task in Natural Language Processing (NLP) that typically determines the native language of an author through their writing or a speaker through their speaking. It has various applications in different areas, such as forensic linguistics and general linguistics studies. Although considerable research has been conducted on NLI regarding two different languages, such as English and German, the literature indicates a significant gap regarding NLI for dialects and subdialects. The gap becomes wider in less-resourced languages such as Kurdish. This research focuses on NLI within the context of a subdialect of Sorani (Central) Kurdish. It aims to investigate the NLI for Hewlêri, a subdialect spoken in Hewlêr (Erbil), the Capital of the Kurdistan Region of Iraq. We collected about 24 hours of speech by recording interviews with 40 native or non-native Hewlêri speakers, 17 female and 23 male. We created three Neural Network-based models: Artificial Neural Network (ANN), Convolutional Neural Network (CNN), and Recurrent Neural Network (RNN), which were evaluated through 66 experiments, covering various time-frames from 1 to 60 seconds, undersampling, oversampling, and cross-validation. The RNN model showed the highest accuracy of 95.92% for 5-second audio segmentation, using an 80:10:10 data splitting scheme. The created dataset is the first speech dataset for NLI on the Hewlêri subdialect in the Sorani Kurdish dialect, which can be of benefit to various research areas.
Abstract (translated)
母语识别（NLI）是自然语言处理（NLP）中的一个任务，通常通过作者的写作或说话人的言语来确定其母语。它在法医语言学和一般语言研究等领域有各种应用。尽管有关两种不同语言（如英语和德语）之间的母语识别的研究已经相当广泛，但关于方言及次方言的文献显示了一个显著的研究空白。特别是对于资源较少的语言，例如库尔德语，这一差距更为明显。本项研究专注于在苏莱曼尼亚（Central）库尔德语的一个次方言——胡维里亚（Hewlêri）语境下的母语识别问题。该研究旨在调查居住于伊拉克库尔德斯坦自治区首府胡维里亚的当地居民所使用的胡维里亚次方言的母语识别情况。我们通过录制40名本地或非本地说话者的访谈，收集了大约24小时的语音数据，其中包括17名女性和23名男性。我们创建了三种基于神经网络的模型：人工神经网络（ANN）、卷积神经网络（CNN）以及循环神经网络（RNN），通过66次实验对其进行了评估，这些实验涵盖了从1秒到60秒的不同时间范围、欠采样、过采样及交叉验证。在使用80:10:10的数据分割方案的情况下，RNN模型显示出了最高的95.92%的准确率，该结果来自对5秒钟音频片段的分析。所创建的数据集是首个用于胡维里亚次方言母语识别的语音数据集，在苏莱曼尼亚库尔德语中具有开创性意义，并且可以为各种研究领域带来益处。
URL
https://arxiv.org/abs/2602.10832
