Translation by the numbers: Facebook AI puts words into multidimensional spaces

PARIS – Designers of machine translation tools still mostly rely on dictionaries to make a foreign language understandable. But now there is a new way: numbers. Facebook researchers say rendering words into figures and exploiting mathematical similarities between languages is a promising avenue -- even if a universal communicator as seen in "Star Trek" remains a distant dream. Powerful automatic translation is a big priority for internet giants. Allowing as many people as possible worldwide to communicate is not just an altruistic goal, but also good business.