“More than 600,000 artworks and other cultural objects, mostly owned by Jews, were stolen by the Nazis leading up to and during World War II…

But reclaiming these artifacts is often a long and fraught process.

'There's no central repository, no database that's telling you where that art is,' said Joel Greenberg, founder of Art Ashes, a nonprofit that helps families track down and recover art looted by the Nazis…

A team at Santa Clara University in Silicon Valley is aspiring to do just that, with a new AI chatbot that could help streamline the complicated process of getting these works back to their owners…

Right now, the tool is only scraping records from one database — that of the Jeu de Paume museum in Paris. The Nazis warehoused tens of thousands of looted artworks at the museum during World War II and kept elaborate records — records that are now available for anyone to search online in a database alongside archives from several other institutions around the world, including the German Bundesarchiv, the French Archives of the Ministry of Europe and Foreign Affairs, and the U.S. National Archives.

But Santoro said his team's AI tool is more intuitive than the Jeu de Paume's database because it doesn't require users to deal with drop-down menus and input keywords into boxes.

'It enables ordinary language queries to be made of art databases,' he said.

By 'ordinary language,' Santoro means users can type a question using everyday words into the chatbot's interface. For example, entering the sentence, 'What artworks belong to Hugo Simon?' brings up a list of more than 70 belonging to the late Jewish banker and art collector, including stolen works by Picasso and Canaletto.”

From NPR.