Facebook created a faster, more accurate translation system using artificial intelligence

Facebook's billion-plus users speak a plethora of languages, and right now, the social network supports translation of over 45 different tongues. That means that if you're an English speaker confronted with German, or a French speaker seeing Spanish, you'll see a link that says "See Translation." But Tuesday, Facebook announced that its machine learning experts have created a neural network that translates language up to nine times faster and more accurately than other current systems that use a standard method to translate text. The scientists who developed the new system work at the social network's FAIR group, which stands for Facebook A.I. Research. "Neural networks are modeled after the human brain," says Michael Auli, of FAIR, and a researcher behind the new system. One of the problems that a neural network can help solve is translating a sentence from one language to another, like French into English.