Every day, Facebook performs some 4.5 billion automatic translations and as of yesterday, theyre all processed using neural networks. Previously, the social networking site used simpler phrase-based machine translation models, but its now switched to the more advanced method. Creating seamless, highly accurate translation experiences for the 2 billion people who use Facebook is difficult, explained the company in a blog post. We need to account for context, slang, typos, abbreviations, and intent simultaneously. <\/p>\n
The big difference between the old system and the new one is the attention span. While the phrase-based system translated sentences word by word, or by looking at short phrases, the neural networks consider whole sentences at a time. They do this using a particular sort of machine learning component known as an LSTM or long short-term memory network. <\/p>\n
The benefits are pretty clear. Compare these two examples from Facebook of a Turkish-to-English translation. The top one comes from the old phrase-based system, and the bottom one from the new system. You can see how taking into account the full context of the sentence produces a more accurate result. <\/p>\n
With the new system, we saw an average relative increase of 11 percent in BLEU a widely used metric for judging the accuracy of machine translation across all languages compared with the phrase-based systems, the company said. <\/p>\n
When a word in a sentence doesnt have a direct corresponding translation in a target language, the neural system will generate a placeholder for the unknown word. A translation of that word is searched for in a sort of in-house dictionary built from Facebooks training data, and the unknown word is replaced. That allows abbreviations like tmrw to be translated into their intended meaning tomorrow. <\/p>\n
Neural networks open up many future development paths related to adding further context, such as a photo accompanying the text of a post, to create better translations, the company said. We are also starting to explore multilingual models that can translate many different language directions. <\/p>\n
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Facebook's translations are now powered completely by AI - The Verge<\/a><\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":" Every day, Facebook performs some 4.5 billion automatic translations and as of yesterday, theyre all processed using neural networks. Continue reading