This is much more impressive than I think it will get credit for.
I mean really, having an always on, immediate access massive NLP DNN system translating every piece of text from any language on the worlds largest platform is a staggering feat.
Facebook has the most impressive applications of ML right now in my opinion. They have Yann Lecun to thank for that (and Mark for recruiting him).
> having an always on, immediate access massive NLP DNN system translating every piece of text from any language on the worlds largest platform is a staggering feat.
Too bad that they also have an always on system that's tracking my doings and whereabouts. Seriously, we need to stop applauding these companies. Sad to see that LeCun and colleagues don't care to find an employer with more noble goals.
I avoid FB as a social network, but I love their open source projects such as those in ML (PyTorch) and web design (React). Weirdly, I feel better working with FB products than the equivalent from Google (Angular and TensorFlow).
It seems that approval for the behavior of a company and it's open tech stack don't need to be correlated.
Gapminder, amnesty, msf, save the children... wait did you ask for ad companies like fb and google that sell clicks but had a noble agenda? I think the mercenary nature of ads precludes most moral stances in deference to the client.
Google switched Google Translate over just last year, November 2016. Considering Facebook is developing all this internally and the scale they operate at and the presumable hardware disadvantages (does FB have any equivalent of Google's TPUs?), switching over in production so quickly is impressive.
45 languages * 44 other langues ~= 2000 translation directions. There are ~4,500 languages with more than 1,000 speakers ~4,500 * 4,499 ~= 20,254,500 language pairs so that's a very long way from every language.
I guess they really don't need to cover all of them though as most of the people speaking a language with low number of speakers would be able to converse in other mainstream languages as well. I can speak four languages but I rarely converse in two of them as speakers of the two languages are usually comfortable with a mainstream language as well.
Impressive indeed. Would you happen to know if Facebook is able to translate without using English as an intermediate language? For example, from Dutch directly to French, without needing to go from Dutch to English to French.
Reminds me reading about Google's new translator. It apparently uses a unique internal language it developed during training. All the languages it knows go through this internal language / neural pattern.
From what I recall reading, Google has people researching this internal language to see if they can discover any new interesting things about human thought.
My impression of the pure DL approaches is that the preferred way to go about it is to map from each available language example, via a common latent representation, to every other available language example.
The common currency is not English but a vector space representing something much more akin to the meaning underlying the statements.
I mean really, having an always on, immediate access massive NLP DNN system translating every piece of text from any language on the worlds largest platform is a staggering feat.
Facebook has the most impressive applications of ML right now in my opinion. They have Yann Lecun to thank for that (and Mark for recruiting him).