Qatar Computing Research Institute (QCRI), one of Hamad Bin Khalifa University’s (HBKU’s) national research institutes, has partnered with Qatar Living, a rich source of non-official information on Qatar, to incorporate natural language understanding technology on the Qatar Living website.
QCRI’s Arabic Language Technology Group has worked on the advancement of the technology for over two years. In collaboration with a team of engineers from Qatar Living, the development is now ready for industry application, allowing visitors to the website the ability to easily and quickly find answers to their questions on the forum to save time.
QCRI joined forces with researchers from the Massachusetts Institute of Technology’s Computer Science and Artificial Intelligence Laboratory (MIT CSAIL)to develop novel algorithms for language processing on the data provided by Qatar Living.
“The collaboration with Qatar Living provides an excellent opportunity to demonstrate our technology, and acquire insights from these kinds of real-world applications,” said Dr Alessandro Moschitti, principal scientist at QCRI and principal investigator on the QCRI side of the project. “Our joint research with MIT has strengthened our ability to build state-of-the-art technology in the field of Natural Language Understanding.”
Dr. James Glass, a senior research scientist at MIT CSAIL said: “Together with researchers at QCRI, and with data provided by Qatar Living, we have been able to jointly develop advanced natural language processing methods that will ultimately benefit society by providing easier, more effective means to search for information available in community question-answering forums.”
Though the World Wide Web has significantly increased access to a vast volume of information, a growing amount of data has become an obstacle to efficiency, requiring users to search for extended periods of time to arrive at sought-after results. The work of QCRI has potential to positively impact the daily lives of users as well as companies focusing on information management.
The QCRI technology is based on machine learning and deep linguistic and semantic analysis, enabling machines to understand questions and comments by forum users. By carrying out intelligent exploration of textual data, computers can analyse user requests, and within a few seconds, find key information among the thousands of comments on the Qatar Living website.
Bilal Randeree, managing director at Qatar Living said, “As the most popular local website in Qatar, we’re excited to be able to better help our users find the information they need by utilizing the technology developed by the QCRI-CSAIL team. Because there is often a lack of reliable information available related to different aspects of living and working in Qatar, our users come to Qatar Living for help from the community.”