JERUSALEM, Sept. 20 (Xinhua) -- The Israel Innovation Authority (IIA) on Wednesday said in a statement that it would invest a total of 30 million shekels (7.88 million U.S. dollars) in 17 projects that are selected to improve the capacity of artificial intelligence (AI) applications to process spoken Hebrew and Arabic and databases created in the two languages.
These projects will form the infrastructure for the research and development of AI applications that require the processing of Hebrew and Arabic languages.
According to the IIA, with the rapid increase in the number of AI applications, the capacity to process Hebrew and Arabic significantly lags behind those of more widely used languages like English.
To narrow this gap, a wide range of infrastructures are required for application developers dependent on language, it added.
Among the selected projects are a model that allows the extraction of information from recorded audio, bidirectional translation models for Hebrew and Arabic languages, a speech-to-text service, and a model for identifying harmful content in texts.
IIA CEO Dror Bin said the plan is crucial for realizing Israel's unique data potential in Hebrew and Arabic, facilitating the adoption of AI in the industry, and advancing innovation in Israel. ■
