Technology Innovation Institute Announces Launch of NOOR, the World’s Largest Arabic NLP Model
11.4.2022 14:16:00 EEST | Business Wire | Press release
Technology Innovation Institute (TII), a global research center and applied research pillar of Abu Dhabi’s Advanced Technology Research Council, today announced the launch of NOOR, the world’s largest Arabic natural language processing (NLP) model to date.
This press release features multimedia. View the full release here: https://www.businesswire.com/news/home/20220411005085/en/
Noor, the world's largest Arabic NLP Model - AI Cross-Center Unit, Technology Innovation Institute (Photo: AETOSWire)
TII’s team of advanced researchers and Artificial Intelligence (AI) specialists, has joined forces with LightOn, a technology company that unlocks extreme-scale machine intelligence for businesses, to transform the Arabic NLP model. The NOOR model has the capability to carry out tasks beyond the domain of language - offering end-to-end pipeline high quality data, including crawling, filtering, and curation at scale. The model facilitates extreme-scale distributed training and serving – to deliver applications with efficient inference and model specialization.
Dr. Ray O. Johnson, CEO, TII and ASPIRE, said: “With this development, we are well on track to enhance our research capabilities and credentials as well as elevate the status of Abu Dhabi and the UAE as a serious research ecosystem. Our expert teams have demonstrated yet again that this region can achieve breakthrough R&D outcomes to impact the world.”
Dr. Ebtesam Almazrouei, Director, AI Cross-Center Unit, TII, said: “Large language models have taken the world of natural language processing by storm, and we are proud to introduce this cutting-edge model with 10 billion parameters - the world’s largest Arabic NLP model. The uniquely large Arabic dataset collected to train the model is the result of months of work that included curating, scrapping, and filtering of varied sources. A special thank you to the entire team that worked on this project to make NOOR the go-to exploration model in Arabic for academicians and businesses everywhere.”
Speaking on the launch, Prof. Mérouane Debbah, Chief Researcher, Digital Science Research Center and AI Cross-Center Unit, TII, said: “With NOOR, TII has expanded the scope of the modern standard Arabic model by leveraging know-how in large language models to build cross-disciplinary, cutting-edge expertise in this new generation of AI research.”
To curate the world’s largest high-quality cross-domain Arabic datasets, NOOR’s unique dataset of more than 30 billion words combines web data with books, poetry, news articles, and technical information to significantly widen the applicability of the model.
Dr. Ebtesam Almazrouei said the NOOR model is based on the popular Transformer architecture. As a decoder-only model, similar in structure to GPT-3, it is programmed to tackle generative tasks with architecture upgraded to reflect the latest developments in the world of machine learning, including improvements such as better positional embeddings. To help ensure quality at scale in the NOOR dataset, the TII team designed an automated filtering pipeline based on machine learning techniques. These tools identify text like quality references and safeguard the model from exposure to spam content.
Leveraging state-of-the-art 3D parallelism, NOOR was trained on a High-Performance Computing resource with 128 A100 GPUs, allowing for the distribution of computations and ensuring efficient use of the available hardware resources.
The Director of the AI Cross-Center Unit noted that this was only the first step in the Unit’s efforts to contribute to the wider UAE Strategy for Artificial Intelligence.
Named for the Arabic word "light", the model has been so called to establish the correlation of the Arabic language model to enlightening the mind.
About Technology Innovation Institute (TII)
For more information, visit www.tii.ae
*Source: AETOSWire
To view this piece of content from cts.businesswire.com, please give your consent at the top of this page.
View source version on businesswire.com: https://www.businesswire.com/news/home/20220411005085/en/
Contact information
Technology Innovation Institute
Sneha Sivanand, sneha.sivanand@tii.ae
About Business Wire
For more than 50 years, Business Wire has been the global leader in press release distribution and regulatory disclosure.
Subscribe to releases from Business Wire
Subscribe to all the latest releases from Business Wire by registering your e-mail address below. You can unsubscribe at any time.
Latest releases from Business Wire
Vertex Energy Announces 6,000 bpd Group III Base Oil Expansion Project24.6.2026 17:00:00 EEST | Press release
Vertex Energy, Inc. (“Vertex” or the “Company”) today announced it is advancing a project at its Mobile, Alabama refinery to produce crude-derived conventional Group III base oils through the Company’s existing hydrocracker and related processing infrastructure, providing lubricant manufacturers and blenders with an additional domestic source of high-quality Group III supply. The project is designed to add an incremental 6,000 barrels per day of conventional Group III production capacity and support production of 4 cSt, 6 cSt, and 8 cSt Group III base oils using an existing crude-derived hydrocracked vacuum gas oil stream produced at the Company’s Mobile, Alabama refinery. Combined with the Company’s existing re-refined Group III base oil production, this additional capacity is expected to make Vertex the leading Group III producer in North America. Vertex has completed preliminary design work and has procured a high-pressure lubricants hydrotreating unit. The Company plans to start pr
Taktile Secures $110M in Goldman Sachs-led Series C to Power AI Transformation in Financial Institutions24.6.2026 16:30:00 EEST | Press release
Taktile, the leader in AI transformation for financial institutions, today announced its $110 million Series C fundraise. Growth Equity at Goldman Sachs Alternatives led the round, with participation from Balderton Capital, Index Ventures, Tiger Global, Y Combinator, and Dig Ventures. Taktile Fast Facts Taktile enables banks and insurers to transform into AI-native organizations that are increasingly powered by autonomous agents. Demand for Taktile accelerated in 2025, as AI models became capable of automating high-stakes decisions that previously required hours of manual work—from underwriting business loans and assessing claims to catching financial crime. Customers automate and optimize decisions with Taktile by combining its financial services expertise and product built for sector-specific AI use cases. One of the world’s largest insurers is running multiple use cases on Taktile, with projected cost efficiencies of over $90M in claims processing alone. Taktile’s team has a proven
New MetLife Study Reveals a 72% “Confidence Gap” in Ability to Recover from Life's Setbacks24.6.2026 16:25:00 EEST | Press release
A new multinational study from MetLife reveals a striking “confidence gap”: while most adults describe themselves as resilient, their confidence drops by 72% when faced with real-life setbacks. The Confident Pathways Report, conducted across the United States, United Kingdom, Japan, and Mexico, was designed to better understand how confidence is built and sustained throughout life. The findings underscore the role of opportunity, preparedness, and support in building confidence - factors that help people navigate uncertainty, recover from setbacks and pursue their goals. At a time when soccer is bringing people and communities together around the world, the findings also highlight how early childhood experiences such as sports, education, and mentorship can help foster resilience and gain confidence from a young age. Key findings across the four countries surveyed include: Confidence drops by 72% when adults consider their ability to recover from setbacks. Respondents were far more lik
StatLab Launches CytoPath Disc, Advancing Standardized Cell Block Preparation Worldwide24.6.2026 16:08:00 EEST | Press release
StatLab Medical Products, a leading global developer and manufacturer of pathology supplies and equipment, today announced the global launch of the CytoPath Disc, an innovative cell block preparation technology designed to standardize and simplify cell block preparation. This press release features multimedia. View the full release here: https://www.businesswire.com/news/home/20260624368623/en/ Developed as an alternative to traditional cell block methods, which convert concentrated cells suspended in fluid into a paraffin-embedded format for slide-based evaluation, the patent‑pending CytoPath Disc offers a more streamlined and efficient approach. The CytoPath Disc absorbs concentrated cells within a simple, sponge-like matrix, which is then processed, embedded, stained, and sectioned using standard histology workflows. Traditional cell block preparation methods often present challenges in achieving consistent results due to complex procedures, as well as the need for additional equipm
TensorX Launches With €8M Seed Funding Round Led by Darius Cubed Ventures for Bet on European Sovereign AI Infrastructure With Plans to Deploy up to €100M in NVIDIA Blackwell GPUs24.6.2026 16:07:00 EEST | Press release
A team of Irish founders has committed €8 million to Nvidia Blackwell GPUs, including the latest B300 chips, to launch TensorX, a sovereign AI inference platform designed for Europe's AI builders, trusted by regulated industries and already generating revenue from paying customers. The company was founded by Shane Morton, is part of the NVIDIA Inception program and is partnering with Dell on sourcing GPU hardware. This press release features multimedia. View the full release here: https://www.businesswire.com/news/home/20260528791384/en/ (From left to right): Craig Donnelly, Shane Morton, Nicole Morton, Tim Grant At a time when enterprises are racing to adopt artificial intelligence but most remain unwilling to let their data leave European jurisdiction, TensorX offers high-performance inference with zero data retention, running entirely on dedicated hardware in Dublin and Helsinki. TensorX is also in advanced talks around a financing facility to further expand its European footprint,
In our pressroom you can read all our latest releases, find our press contacts, images, documents and other relevant information about us.
Visit our pressroom