Qatar Computing Research Institute
Discovery to Delivery
Press Releases Details
Major efforts are underway to boost Arabic online content in Qatar
- Publication Date:
- 16/12/2012
- Category:
- Press releases
QCRI, Taghreedat organize successful event with Google, YouTube, Twitter reaching out to the local community about Arabic language content online. Over 400 community members gathered at the Arabic YouTube Tweetup looking to contribute online content.
Doha, Qatar, 16 December 2012: According to experts at Google, Arabic is among the fastest growing languages on the web. Over the past two years, social networking sites including Twitter, YouTube and Facebook have experienced a massive increase in Arabic language usage. Yet with close to 350 million Arabic language speakers in the Arab world, the amount of online content in Arabic hovers at only 3%.
Qatar Computing Research Institute (QCRI) and Taghreedat, a regional Arabic e- content community building initiative based in Qatar, organized an Arabic YouTube Tweetup over the weekend to introduce new programs and tools that will help to close this gap in content. The event featured social networking and digital content giants YouTube, Google and Twitter who talked about their initiatives in promoting and supporting Arabic language online.
The tweetup, scheduled as part of Google’s month-long Arabic Web Days project, gathered over 400 content creators from around the region looking to contribute to the acceleration of digital content in Arabic, with a focus on developing video content for YouTube. Representatives from YouTube and video content entrepreneurs from the region shared their insight and experiences on how to create viral Arabic videos on YouTube.
Dr. Ahmed Elmagarmid, Executive Director of QCRI, introduced the Arabic language initiatives underway at the Institute. “At QCRI we have a large team dedicated to promoting the Arabic language by conducting world-class research in Arabic language technologies – including content creation, machine translation and search optimization,” said Dr. Elmagarmid. “This is our culture, our language. As a community, we are in the best position to create and make significant contributions to enrich the content and to drive the renaissance of the Arabic language.”
Speaking about Ethraa, QCRI’s initiative to enrich and increase Arabic digital content, Majd Abbar, Director of Arabic Content Initiatives at QCRI, explained the reasons behind the effort: “Language provides the underpinnings of a knowledge-based society – communication, expression of thoughts, sharing of ideas and information. Arabic was once the language of science, literature and knowledge. Ethraa is focused on ensuring that the Arabic language is restored to its natural position as a language of science and research, which supports Qatar’s transformation to a knowledge-based economy.”
Ensuring not only the ease of use as an instantaneous communication platform but also that the content is meaningful and interesting to the rest of the world is also what drives the efforts at Twitter, Inc. With approximately 17 million tweets in Arabic every day, Kaveh Gharib, Localization Project Manager at Twitter Inc., stated that alongside the opportunities for content growth come challenges – such as how to separate the signal from the noise. “In the Middle East, we need to tap into our creativity and take control of our own content – not let others tell it for us. We each have the power to create stories,” he said. “This should be done by developing high quality, localized content.” Twitter is committed to providing a platform that supports right-to-left languages which would offer a tremendous boost to Arabic digital content creation.
Dr. Fayeq Oweis, Arabic Localization Manager at Google, Inc. talked about numerous initiatives underway at Google in support of creating Arabic digital content – including local Arabic dialect voice recognition on Android phones, and tools that are available to write in Arabic without falling back on Arabizi. The YouTube platform is also fully Arabicized.
There are eight localized YouTube domains in the Middle East and more than 260 million videos viewed a day in the MENA region. Maha Abouelenein, Head of Communications for Google MENA talked about the initiatives at YouTube for the region including the Google Media Academy that teaches journalists how to find the news and broadcast the news using YouTube, and includes tips on how to tag videos, how to embed videos and how to share videos in their reporting. “YouTube is a very powerful platform that gives Arabic users global reach through video, with the talent in MENA we want to share their vibrant content with the rest of the world. We are working to provide the right tools to create and capture these moments, and let people know they can make a difference. There are a lot of moving stories in the region, a lot of rich content. The region’s youth can play a key role to tell these stories and be the voice of an entire generation,” said Abouelenein.
Samy Al Mubarak, co-founder of Taghreedat, summed up the evening and encouraged the audience to contribute creative Arabic content online. “It is not enough to talk about the need for better Arabic online content. It’s time to act and do something about it. We should take part together at the individual level and at the institutional level. We saw ways to do this today – with initiatives at Taghreedat, QCRI, Google, YouTube and Twitter we can localize content – and more effectively represent our ideas, our vision, our culture.”
ENDS
In the News
QCRI scientists recognized with best paper at ISCRAM 2013
22/05/2013
Extracting Information Nuggets from Disaster Related Messages in Social Media authored by QCRI's Muhammad Imran, Carlos Castillo, Patrick Meier, former QCRI post-doc Shady Elbassuoni and Fernando Diaz of Microsoft Research was recognized as the best paper at this year's ISCRAM conference.
Crisis Maps: Harnessing the Power of Big Data to Deliver Humanitarian Assistance
19/05/2013
Dr. Patrick Meier talks about QCRI's work to solve major humanitarian challenges in Forbes.
Research proposal receives QNRF NPRP award
15/05/2013
Dr. Halima Bensmail, QCRI Scientific Computing, is a key investigator on a research proposal awarded by QNRF's sixth NPRP cycle for the proposal titled: Quantitative mapping of HIV incidence among stable couples and evaluation of impact of interventions targeting sero-discordant couples.
Upcoming Events
2013
29/05/2013,
Rhodes Island, Greece
Dr. Halima Bensmail, Senior Scientist of QCRI's Scientific Computing team, is an Invited speaker at the PETRAE, giving a talk on “Time course and Neural Representation of Memorability: faces and places: an alpha-sparse model for classifying memorability regions”
For more info on PETRAE please visit www.petrae.org
09/06/2013 - 14/06/2013,
Atlanta, Georgia USA
The North American Chapter of the Association for Computational Linguistics (NAACL) Annual Conference takes place in Atlanta, Georgia (USA) from June 9 - 14, 2013.
22/06/2013 - 27/06/2013,
New York, New York, USA
Our Data Analytics team will be at 2013 SIGMOD / PODS in New York. The team will present two papers.
Press Releases
QCRI invites applicants for summer internships
08/05/2013
Qatar Computing Research Institute (QCRI) will be kicking off its 2013 summer internship program soon, and invites computer science and computer engineering students to apply. The intensive two-month internship program provides students with the opportunity to work closely with top researchers, and receive practical work experience based on their studies. Applications will be accepted until May 12, 2013.
Presenting a Vision for the Future of Humanitarian Technology
31/03/2013
Dr Patrick Meier, Director of Social Innovation at Qatar Computing Research Institute (QCRI) and the world’s foremost expert on humanitarian technology, explores the rise of digital humanitarian response and how new technologies are reshaping the humanitarian space in an upcoming talk.
QCRI and Boeing to collaborate on Data Analytics Research
24/03/2013
Joint project will seek to identify patterns in large data streams
Research collaboration broadens Boeing engagement in Qatar, strengthens relationship with Qatar Foundation
Quick Links
Our People
Our Research
Media Resources
Collaboration Highlights
Follow Us