Facebook's New AI Could Lead to Translations That Actually Make Sense

Christopher Manning, a Stanford University professor who specialized in machine translation and has reviewed the paper, calls it an "impressive achievement," particularly because it can train translation models more quickly than existing systems. This past fall, Google unveiled a new translation system driven entirely by neural networks that topped existing models, and many other companies and researchers are pushing in the same direction, most notably Microsoft and Chinese web giant Baidu. "We've seen more improvements over the past two years than we have seen in the past decade," says John Tinsley, the CEO of Iconic Translation Machines, a translation technology company based in Dublin. And others have explored such networks as a basic technique for machine translation, including researchers at DeepMind, a Google AI lab based in London.