An Arabic-literate AI tool will be developed to better contextualise the Arab world, and a series of initiatives will be launched to aid the development, Dubai Media Academy (DMA) announced.
As the first step in this initiative, DMA hosted a study with Arabic media institutions, technology experts, and academics from different Arab countries to tackle the problem of inaccessible Large Language Models (LLMs).
The announcement was made on the first day of Dubai AI Week 2025, running from April 21 to April 25.
Director of DMA Muna Bu Samra said that this initiative is one of many that will be announced in May of this year and that “today [Monday] is the first stage of this report to fully understand the needs of the media.” She added that there will be an “ecosystem” which will connect media institutions, developers, and academics to “better understand the Arabic language,” as well as to protect Arab identity.
“The existence of developing new tools and new AI models will contribute to preserving our identity and culture,” she said. Also called “عi” (the Arabic letter “ع” is the first letter of the word “Arabic” in its original language), the model will make AI more accessible to Arabic-speaking users.
Many LLMs, such as ChatGPT, do not have the ability to understand context surrounding certain Arabic words and sentences, Asem Galal, advisor of DMA, said. Certain words in Arabic, he explained, are written the same way but pronounced differently, depending on the placement of the word. “If today I gave an AI model a sentence, but I don’t know the text or the sound, and I don’t know the form, [AI] won’t know which word to use,” he said.
He added that Generative AI also fails to understand cultural sensitivities related to the Arab world. “All of these problems can be easily solved if we have a model that understands the cultural sensitivities of AI,” Galal said.
Starting December 2024, the Mohamed bin Zayed University of Artificial Intelligence (MBZUAI) has been developing various advanced linguistic AI models to improve machine understanding of Arabic.
The theme for that year’s United Nations (UN) Arabic Language Day was “Arabic Language and AI: Advancing Innovation while Preserving Cultural Heritage”.
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