Israeli researchers are using artificial intelligence (AI) to sift through troves of records in an attempt to identify hundreds of thousands of Jews killed in the Holocaust whose names are not listed on official memorials. There is.
Amid enhancements to these commemorations, staff at the Yad Vashem World Holocaust Remembrance Center in Jerusalem will enhance searches for details of known and unknown victims after developing proprietary software powered by AI. He said he is working on it.
Over the years, volunteers have tracked down information about 4.9 million people by reading statements and documents, reviewing film footage, cemetery sites and other records.
technology is more accurate
“It's very difficult for a human to do that. You just have to scrutinize everything and make sure you don't miss any details,” Esther Faxbloomer, the center's head of software development, told Reuters. .
There are large gaps in the existing 9 million records. The Nazis “just took people away, shot them, buried them in pits, and there was no one left to talk about them,” Faxbloomer said.
Plus, there's the enormous task of relating individuals to dates, family members, and other details, monitoring for duplicates, and comparing accounts.
The AI system has been developed over the past two years to screen records in languages including English, Hebrew, German and Russian, and is currently being tested.
“The technology works very fast, takes several hours to examine hundreds of testimonies, and the results are very accurate,” Fax-Bloomer said.
“We found that each testimonial yielded six to seven names with full details that could be automatically added to the database, and that approximately 10% of the names we found were already in the database. But 90% of them were new names that we didn't know. ”
In one case, information was found about Judith and Ruth Rosenbaum, four-and-a-half-year-old twin sisters from Romania who were taken to Auschwitz. Judith survived. Ruth was killed.
“And we were able to bring in more information about Ruth from someone who was not her family, someone who met her at the camp,” Fax-Bloomer said.
At the trial, staff examined 400 of the 30,000 testimonies, including many of the survivors' three-hour video recordings.
Fax-Bloomer said 1,500 new names have been added and more are expected to be added in the coming weeks when the system is used for all 30,000 testimonies. The next phase of the trial will focus on diaries.
“We believe that in doing so, we will be able to tell the story of what happened to many of the victims who were murdered, young children that no one knew about.”
