The Arabic Language Technology (ALT) team at Hamad Bin Khalifa University’s Qatar Computing Research Institute (QCRI) received the King Salman Global Academy for the Arabic Language Award 2023 in the “Computerizing the Arabic Language and Serving it with Modern Technologies” category.

The award honored the ALT team’s research in the field of Natural Language Processing (NLP), development and dissemination of advanced technologies, and proactive engagement with academic and industry partners around the world. 

The King Salman Global Academy for the Arabic Language Awards recognizes individuals as well as public and private institutions across the Middle East and North Africa (MENA) who endeavor to preserve the Arabic language and promote both its research and its usage around the world.

The Awards selected winners in four categories: Teaching and Learning the Arabic Language, Computerizing the Arabic Language and Serving it with Modern Technologies, Arabic Language Research and Scientific Studies, and Spreading Linguistic Awareness and Creating Linguistic Community Initiatives. Recipients received a share of a SR 1,600,000 award.

Speaking about the award, Dr. Ahmed Elmagarmid, Executive Director, QCRI, said: “Language is the soul of the people. As communication paradigms shift, it is critical to create effective Arabic language technologies for people in the Arab world and beyond. This award reaffirms QCRI’s dedication to cutting-edge computing research that brings value to its stakeholders in Qatar and has a positive impact on the communities around the world.”

The ALT team’s portfolio of NLP technologies covers Arabic text and speech processing for the Modern Standard Arabic (MSA) and Arabic dialects. Among them are Farasa, a collection of  NLP technologies ranging from diacritization to paraphrasing of MSA and dialectal texts  ; Asad, a semantics analysis tool focused on social media content; QATS, a state-of-the-art Arabic speech recognition tool; Shaheen, an effective machine translation system for Arabic and English; and Tanbih, a news and media focused tool for detecting misinformation and harmful content. The ALT team regularly publishes in internationally renowned peer-reviewed journals, participates in leading computer science conferences, and supports fellow researchers by providing free use of NLP tools and data sets essential for NLP research and innovation. 

QCRI is a national research institute dedicated to the needs of Qatar, the Arab region and the world, QCRI conducts cutting-edge, applied computing research in dedicated areas including Arabic language technologies, Cybersecurity, Digital Health and Humanitarian Computing underpinned with Artificial Intelligence (AI).