MBZUAI Research Initiative Secures US$1 Million Funding From Google.org To Advance Inclusive AI Across MENA Languages

Google.org, the philanthropic arm of American tech giant Google, has granted US$1 million to Dr. Thamar Solorio, Vice Provost of Faculty Excellence and Advancement and Professor of Natural Language Processing at the UAE's Mohamed bin Zayed University of Artificial Intelligence (MBZUAI), to lead a research initiative bridging the "data divide" that limits artificial intelligence’s ability to understand and serve speakers of underrepresented languages with the same precision as it does English. 

While AI continues to make rapid strides, its language models are largely trained on Western, data-rich languages. This bias means they often struggle to capture the complexity, dialectal variety, and cultural nuances of the MENA. Instead of retrofitting Western AI tools, Professor Solorio’s research and her team flip this approach by building a research framework designed from the ground up to reflect the linguistic diversity and sociocultural realities of the MENA region. By making AI development more accessible, the initiative seeks to equip communities across the MENA region with speech and language technologies designed for their unique needs, ensuring that all communities can participate in the fast-moving AI landscape.  

In a statement, Professor Solorio said, “This funding allows us to take our research from an early exploratory phase to a level that can not only redefine the field, but lead to impact in people’s lives. This support is vital because it allows us to move beyond adaptation of high-resource models to linguistically grounded AI for MENA languages, which highlights a much-needed paradigm shift in the field.”  

Yossi Matias, Vice President, Google, and Head of Google Research, added, “We are happy to collaborate with MBZUAI, which is deeply rooted in advancing AI research and fostering regional academic talent. By focusing on low-resource languages in large language models, we are progressing on the MENA AI Opportunity Initiative’s commitment to providing access to the most innovative AI technology in Arabic, its dialects and other languages spoken in the region. Funding this research aligns with our goal to accelerate scientific discovery through cooperation that delivers real-world impact.”  

Pictured in the lead image is MBZUAI Vice Provost of Faculty Excellence and Advancement and Professor of Natural Language Processing Dr. Thamar Solorio. Image courtesy MBZUAI.