When Facebook shows you an automated translation of someone’s post, the tech behind that translation is now based entirely on neural networks – essentially, brain-like systems that are among the building blocks of today’s artificial intelligence efforts.
Facebook announced the move Thursday. Previously, it had been using a combination of technologies, also including good old-fashioned phrase-based machine translation models.
As the company noted, phrase-based machine translation doesn’t work so well when translating between languages that order words in very different ways, because the technique relies on breaking sentences down into phrases.
