The world’s largest natural language processing model for Arabic has been introduced by Abu Dhabi’s research hub. Natural language processing, or NPL, is a vital component of the rapidly growing artificial intelligence industry, assisting computers in decoding spoken and written language to accelerate the development of everything from language translation tools to Siri and Alexa-style smart assistants.
The Noor model, developed at the Technology Innovation Institute, may provide the Arab world with a new competitive advantage in the digitalization push, as tools such as chatbots, market intelligence, and machine translation are heavily skewed toward English and Chinese-speaking markets.
“At the 10 billion scales, our model can tackle more advanced tasks and take in more complex instructions from humans to machines,” Dr Almazrouei (a director at TII who led the project) said. “For instance, it can summarise texts, assist with writing — for example, a press release. Also, it can be used to power more natural and effective chatbots, or even evaluate the language level of employees. This is only the start, and we want to scale to even larger and more capable models in the future.”
