The Technology Innovation Institute (TII) in Abu Dhabi unveils the world’s largest Arabic natural language processing model named NOOR.
This is a remarkable development in the global NLP industry as languages like English and Chinese dominate the global market of chatbots, market intelligence, and machine translation. With the launch of NOOR, the Arab world will also have a fresh edge in the quest for digitization.
Natural language processing is a critical component of the rapidly growing artificial intelligence industry as it assists computers in decoding spoken and written language to accelerate the development of language translation software, smart assistants like Alexa, Siri, Google Assistant, and many more.
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TII researchers created an end-to-end pipeline for collecting high-quality data at scale, which included crawling, filtering, and curation for developing the new NLP model. Moreover, they also created optimized services for large-scale distributed training and serving.
Developers have built NOOR to allow businesses and universities to develop new tools like sentiment analysis on social media or new Arabic virtual assistants.
Director of AI Cross-center Unit at TII, Dr. Ebtesam Almazrouei, said, “Large language models have taken the world of natural language processing by storm, and we are proud to introduce this cutting-edge model with 10 billion parameters – the world’s largest Arabic NLP model. The uniquely large Arabic dataset collected to train the model is the result of months of work that included curating, scrapping, and filtering of varied sources.”
He further thanked the entire team for their efforts in developing NOOR and making it a go-to exploration model in Arabic for academics and businesses everywhere.
“With this development, we are on track to boost our research capabilities and credentials in AI, as well as elevating the status of Abu Dhabi and the UAE as a serious research ecosystem,” said CEO of TII and ASPIRE, Dr. Ray O. Johnson.
