QCRI partners with Qatar Living

DOHA: Qatar Computing Research Institute (QCRI) of Hamad Bin Khalifa University (HBKU) has partnered with Qatar Living a rich source of non-official information on Qatar to incorporate natural language understanding technology on Qatar Living website.

QCRI’s Arabic Language Technology (ALT) Group has worked on the advancement of the technology for over two years. In collaboration with engineers from Qatar Living the development is ready for industry application allowing visitors to the website the ability to easily and quickly find answers to questions 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 real-world applications” said Dr Alessandro Moschitti Principal Scientist QCRI and Principal Investigator on the QCRI side of the project. “Our research with MIT has strengthened our ability to build state-of-the-art technology in the field of natural language understanding.”

The QCRI technology is based on machine learning and 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 in a few seconds find key information among the thousands of comments on the Qatar Living website. With the introduction of semantic processing technology Internet users are offered benefits including an increase in search effectiveness and accuracy and in the near future the possibility of automatically deriving the veracity of information they receive.

Bilal Randeree Managing Director 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 utilising 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.” Natural Language Processing has been incorporated into the website over the past week. The foundation research was presented at last week’s annual QCRI-MIT CSAIL research projects review meeting in Doha. The research teams have begun developing a new type of Arabic language search technology and the next generation of semantic-based text search featuring customised user interfaces measuring mechanisms for data reliability identification of malicious users and near-duplicate search queries. To learn more about the initiative and other research being conducted at QCRI visit http://qcri.com/.

The Peninsula