The South Africa office of Meta (www.Facebook.com) has confirmed the opening of its Artificial Intelligence (AI) Machine Translation Research Helps, which will break language barriers globally. This was made known in a press statement dated July 6, 2022.
The service is an AI-built and open-sourced ‘No Language Left Behind’ (NLLB-200) single model, believed to be the first to translate across 200 different languages, including 55 African languages, with state-of-the-art results.
According to the press statement, "Meta is using the modeling techniques and learning from the project to improve and extend translations on Facebook, Instagram, and Wikipedia," it states.
The Meta Public Policy Director for Africa, Balkissa Ide Siddo, while commending the AI model, described the continent by saying, "Africa is a continent with very high linguistic diversity, and language barriers exist day to day." "We are pleased to announce that 55 African languages will be included in this machine translation research, making it a breakthrough for our continent."
Siddo furthered, "In the future, imagine visiting your favorite Facebook group, coming across a post in Igbo or Luganda, and being able to understand it in your language with just the click of a button. That’s where we hope research like this leads us."
Highly accurate translations in more languages could also help to spot harmful content and misinformation, protect election integrity, and curb instances of online sexual exploitation and human trafficking. "
In their release, Facebook said, "To develop high-quality machine translation capabilities for most of the world’s low-resource languages (https://bit.ly/3Av3FyB), this single AI model was designed with a focus on African languages." "They are challenging from a machine translation perspective.
The artificial intelligence models, according to information, require lots and lots of data to help them learn, but the important thing is that there's not a lot of human-translated training data for these languages. For example, there are more than 20 million people who speak and write in Luganda, but examples of this written language are extremely difficult to find on the internet.
The release said, "We 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." We also work with professional translators to do human evaluation too, meaning people who speak the languages natively evaluate what the AI produces. "
As Meta said, the reality of their work 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 language. In light of this, Facebook stated that they intend to change this by developing more inclusive machine translation systems, which will allow access to the web for the more than 4 billion people worldwide who are currently excluded because they do not speak one of the few languages in which content is available.
The Chief Executive Officer of Meta, Mark Zuckerberg, in a post on his Facebook profile (https://bit.ly/3nJEBwo), said, "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. "
Ide Siddo, while commenting on accessibility and inclusion in line with building an equitable metaverse, said, "At Meta, we are working today to ensure that as many people as possible will be able to access the new educational, social, and economic opportunities that the next evolution of the internet will bring to future technology and an everyday living experience tomorrow."
However, to confirm the translations are of high quality, Meta has created a new evaluation dataset, FLORES-200, which can be accessed at (https://bit.ly/3aqMnrM). It can also be used to measure NLLB-200’s performance in each language. The results, according to Facebook, "revealed that NLLB-200 exceeds the previous state of the art by an average of 44 percent."
The translations were successful as a result of Meta’s partnership with the Wikimedia Foundation (https://WikimediaFoundation.org), the non-profit organization that hosts Wikipedia and other free knowledge projects. Using the Wikimedia Foundation’s Content Translation Tool (https://bit.ly/3NNCMcf), articles can now be easily translated into more than 20 low-resource languages (those that don’t have extensive datasets to train AI systems), including 10 that previously were not supported by any machine translation tools on the platform.
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