Facebook created a faster, more accurate translation system using artificial

intelligence

Facebook’s billion-plus users speak a plethora of languages, and right now, the social network
supports translation of over 45 different tongues. That means that if you’re an English speaker
confronted with German, or a French speaker seeing Spanish, you’ll see a link that says “See
Translation.”

But Tuesday, Facebook announced that its machine learning experts have created a neural
network that translates language up to nine times faster and more accurately than other current
systems that use a standard method to translate text.

The scientists who developed the new system work at the social network’s FAIR group, which
stands for Facebook A.I. Research.

“Neural networks are modeled after the human brain,” says Michael Auli, of FAIR, and a
researcher behind the new system. One of the problems that a neural network can help solve is
translating a sentence from one language to another, like French into English. This network
could also be used to do tasks like summarize text, according to a blog item posted on Facebook
about the research.

But there are multiple types of neural networks. The standard approach so far has been to use
recurrent neural networks to translate text, which look at one word at a time and then predict
what the output word in the new language should be. It learns the sentence as it reads it. But
the Facebook researchers tapped a different technique, called a convolutional neural network,
or CNN, which looks at words in groups instead of one at a time.

“It doesn’t go left to right,” Auli says, of their translator. “[It can] look at the data all at the
same time.” For example, a convolutional neural network translator can look at the first five
words of a sentence, while at the same time considering the second through sixth words,
meaning the system works in parallel with itself.

Graham Neubig, an assistant professor at Carnegie Mellon University’s Language

Technologies Institute, researches natural language processing and machine translation. He
says that this isn’t the first time this kind of neural network has been used to translate text, but
that this seems to be the best he’s ever seen it executed with a convolutional neural network.

“What this Facebook paper has basically showed—it’s revisiting convolutional neural
networks, but this time they’ve actually made it really work very well,” he says.
Facebook isn’t yet saying how it plans to integrate the new technology with its consumer-facing
product yet; that’s more the purview of a department there call the applied machine learning
group. But in the meantime, they’ve released the tech publicly as open-source, so other coders
can benefit from it

That’s a point that pleases Neubig. “If it’s fast and accurate,” he says, “it’ll be a great additional
contribution to the field.”1

1
https://www.popsci.com/facebook-created-faster-more-accurate-translation-system-using-
artificial-intelligence
Keyword :
a. Plethora
b. Confronted
c. Summarize
d. Approach
e. Recurrent
f. Convolutional
g. Considering
h. Instead

Question :
1. What is this material about?
2. Who is the name of the CEO of the Facebook?
3. What was said Michael Auli, of FAIR, and a researcher behind the new system?
4. FAIR stands for what?
5. Social Facebook Media supports translations in more than one language?