Artificial Intelligence Speeds Efforts to Enhance Online Arabic Content

Arabic is spoken by more than 440 million people worldwide and is the fourth most-common language used on the Internet today. Yet the Arabic language is seriously underrepresented online. Digital content in Arabic accounts for only 1 to 3 percent of all content online, according to a paper, "Digital Arabic Content," produced by the International Telecommunication Union for a summit in 2012. A recent study by the W3Techs survey firm found that Arabic was the language of fewer than 1 percent of websites it surveyed. Kareem Darwish, a senior scientist at the Arabic Language Technologies Group at the Qatar Computing Research Institute, in Doha, is part of a team working on tools that use artificial intelligence to change that.