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Translation

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Meta’s New AI-powered Speech Translation System For Hokkien Pioneers A New Approach For An Unwritten Language

Until now, AI translation has mainly focused on written languages. Yet nearly half of the world’s 7,000+ living languages are primarily oral and do not have a standard or widely used writing system. This makes it impossible to build machine translation tools using standard techniques, which require large amounts of written text in order to train an AI model. To address this challenge, we’ve built the first AI-powered translation system for a primarily oral language, Hokkien. Hokkien is widely spoken within the Chinese diaspora but lacks a standard written form. Our technology allows Hokkien speakers to hold conversations with English speakers.…
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200 Languages Within A Single AI Model: A Breakthrough In High-Quality Machine Translation

Meta AI has built a single AI model, NLLB-200, that is the first to translate across 200 different languages with state-of-the-art quality that has been validated through extensive evaluations for each of them. We’ve 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. We’re now using modeling techniques and learnings from the project to improve and extend translations on Facebook, Instagram, and Wikipedia. We’re open-sourcing NLLB-200 models, FLORES-200, model training code, and code for…
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Translating Lost Languages Using Machine Learning

Recent research suggests that most languages that have ever existed are no longer spoken. Dozens of these dead languages are also considered to be lost, or “undeciphered” — that is, we don’t know enough about their grammar, vocabulary, or syntax to be able to actually understand their texts. Lost languages are more than a mere academic curiosity; without them, we miss an entire body of knowledge about the people who spoke them. Unfortunately, most of them have such minimal records that scientists can’t decipher them by using machine-translation algorithms like Google Translate. Some don’t have a well-researched “relative” language to be compared to,…
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The First AI Model That Translates 100 Languages Without Relying On English Data

Facebook AI is introducing, M2M-100 the first multilingual machine translation (MMT) model that translates between any pair of 100 languages without relying on English data. It’s open sourced here. When translating, say, Chinese to French, previous best multilingual models train on Chinese to English and English to French, because English training data is the most widely available. Our model directly trains on Chinese to French data to better preserve meaning. It outperforms English-centric systems by 10 points on the widely used BLEU metric for evaluating machine translations. M2M-100 is trained on a total of 2,200 language directions — or 10x more than previous…
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Why Hasn’t AI Mastered Language Translation?

In the myth about the Tower of Babel, people conspired to build a city and tower that would reach heaven. Their creator observed, “And now nothing will be restrained from them, which they have imagined to do.” According to the myth, God thwarted this effort by creating diverse languages so that they could no longer collaborate. In our modern times, we’re experiencing a state of unprecedented connectivity thanks to technology. However, we’re still living under the shadow of the Tower of Babel. Language remains a barrier in business and marketing. Even though technological devices can quickly and easily connect, humans…
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