Data, Morphology, and Evaluation Challenges in Turkish NLP Projects
Turkish NLP projects may look similar to general natural language processing tasks on the surface, but they involve distinct challenges in data, morphology, and evaluation. Agglutinative structure, rich inflection, surface-form explosion, the semantic role of suffixes, spelling variation, colloquial usage, code-switching, domain-specific terminology, and limited high-quality datasets make Turkish NLP much more than a simple “collect more data” problem. In addition, evaluation in Turkish NLP is often misleading when reduced to standard metrics alone, because token-level accuracy, task success, morphological correctness, rare-case performance, and production robustness are not the same thing. This guide explains the major data, morphology, and evaluation challenges in Turkish NLP projects and presents practical solution strategies across classification, NER, retrieval, LLM, and enterprise NLP settings.