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New Israeli technology reads and summarizes texts in a variety of languages, which represents an invaluable time-saver for students, professors, and other researchers.

By United with Israel Staff

Thanks to a new Israeli technology, students and professionals will soon be able to use an artificial intelligence (AI) program to summarize articles and other texts in a variety of languages.

Researchers at Ben-Gurion University (BGU) have created a technology that summarizes text automatically, which extract and summarize articles, magazines, and online databases in a multitude of languages. It uses a genetic algorithm that ranks document sentences, using statistical sentence features, which can be calculated for sentences in any language. It then extracts top–ranking sentences into a summary.

Prof. Mark Last, a BGU researcher on the project, remarked on the substantive benefits the technology provides, explaining that the the new AI-based program “is crucial for search engines as well as other end-users, such as researchers, libraries and the media,” according to a statement released by BGU.

The technology was tested in nine languages: English, Hebrew, Arabic, Persian, Russian, Chinese, German, French, and Spanish, and its summarization quality was evaluated in four languages: English, Hebrew, Arabic and Persian.

The results showed a high level of similarity to human-generated summaries.

Zafrir Levy, senior VP for business development at BGN Technologies, commented, “This tool will be a valuable addition to our ability to benefit from the vast amounts of text available online. After filing a patent to protect the technology, we are currently looking for potential partners for further development and commercialization of this promising invention.”