Facebook AI Effort Looks to Extend Search Engines

Facebook is rolling out a "deep-learning based text understanding engine" that leverages neural network architectures and promises to challenge the Google search engine by bringing "near-human accuracy" to the process of sorting through the daily flood of social media posts on its web site. Facebook's (NASDAQ: FB) AI initiative called Deep Text announced in a blog post last week also could advance the state of the art in terms of organizing the flood of unstructured text data generated by the leading social media site. The approach also seeks to expand current natural language processing (NLP) techniques that are frequently tripped up by slang. Among the early goals of the search effort is ferretting out relevant information from social media posts that would link sellers with buyers. The company said Deep Text uses convolutional and recurrent neural network approaches to perform word- and character-level learning. The scheme also employs Torch to train neural networks along with its "AI backbone called Fb Learner Flow.