Integrating Social Science Research across Languages with Assistance from Artificial Intelligence

Abstract

Disseminating new research findings and integrating them into future research are crucial tasks for cumulative knowledge production. We address the challenges of dissemination and integration of research in the social sciences of the Middle East and North Africa region, where scholarship written in Arabic is often overlooked by scholars writing in English. Although this marginalization reflects differences in taste, quality, method, and theory, some of the hierarchy is due to English-language scholars’ lack of awareness of relevant Arabic-language work. This ignorance is perpetuated by inaccessibility. We propose an open-source translation tool to aggregate relevant articles based on artificial intelligence models to lower the cost of cross-language literature review. If English-language researchers are willing to commit to the ethical value of integrating work published in local languages, recent technological developments make it feasible.