Director of CMU Language Technologies Institute shares insights into challenges and opportunities of Arabic Natural Language Processing

Mona Diab, the director of the Language Technologies Institute at Carnegie Mellon University, shared her insights into generative AI and the Arabic language during a visit to the Qatar campus. Carnegie Mellon University in Qatar is a Qatar Foundation partner university. 

Diab, who is an expert in Arabic Natural Language Processing (NLP), believes that Arabic provides unique challenges to generative AI platforms, like ChatGPT, that are based on large amounts of information.

“People tell you there’s so much data in Arabic, but in reality, the data is so diverse that you really don’t have enough patterns from a computer science perspective,” said Diab.

“This is an interesting challenge. We need to develop technologies that are able to embrace the diversity of the Arabic language, while at the same time figuring out the knowledge transfer across the dialects. It’s about looking at language families in a closer way.”

Diab believes that breakthroughs in Arabic NLP can lead to advances in other languages as well. “When you’ve solved this problem for Arabic, you could solve it for other language families. It will help unlock advances in NLP for other languages of the world.”

While visiting Doha, Diab spoke at the 2023 WISE Summit, as well as the A. Nico Habermann Distinguished Lecture Series in Computer Science at CMU-Q. 

Read Mona Diab’s Arabic language interview with Al Sharq.