Meta announced that it has built and open sourced ‘No Language Left Behind’ NLLB-200, a single AI model that can translate across 200 different languages, including 55 African languages. Meta uses the modelling techniques and learnings from the project to improve and extend translations on Facebook, Instagram, and Wikipedia.
According to Mark Zuckerberg in a post on his Facebook page,
It’s impressive how much AI is improving all of our services. We just open-sourced an AI model we built that can translate across 200 different languages — many of which aren’t supported by current translation systems. We call this project No Language Left Behind, and the AI modeling techniques we used are helping make high quality translations for languages spoken by billions of people around the world.
To give a sense of the scale, the 200-language model has over 50 billion parameters, and we trained it using our new Research SuperCluster, which is one of the world’s fastest AI supercomputers. The advances here will enable more than 25 billion translations every day across our apps.
Communicating across languages is one superpower that AI provides, but as we keep advancing our AI work it’s improving everything we do — from showing the most interesting content on Facebook and Instagram, to recommending more relevant ads, to keeping our services safe for everyone.
Meta worked with professional translators for each of these languages to develop a reliable benchmark which can automatically assess translation quality for many low-resource languages. Meta also worked with professional translators to do human evaluation too, meaning people who speak the languages natively evaluate what the AI produced.
“The reality is that a handful of languages dominate the web, so only a fraction of the world can access content and contribute to the web in their own language. We want to change this by creating more inclusive machine translations systems – ones that unlock access to the web for the more than 4B people around the world that are currently excluded because they do not speak one of the few languages content is available in,” says Meta
Meta has also created a new evaluation dataset, FLORES-200, and measured NLLB-200’s performance in each language to confirm that the translations are high quality. NLLB-200 exceeds the previous state of the art by an average of 44 percent
In February this year, Mark Zuckerberg had announced that Meta was working on a big new AI research project to make translation software that works for “everyone in the world.” The project was announced at an event highlighting the benefits AI may bring to Meta’s metaverse goals.
To explore a demo of NLLB-200 showing how the model can translate stories from around the world, visit here
1 Comment
Pingback: Meta unveils AI suite that makes speech translation more seamless and expressive - Innovation Village | Technology, Product Reviews, Business