Facebook AI can translate directly between any of 100 languages

Facebook has developed an artificial intelligence capable of accurately translating between any pair of 100 languages without relying on first translating to English, as many existing systems do. The AI outperforms such systems by 10 points on a 100-point scale used by academics to automatically evaluate the quality of machine translations. Translations produced by the model were also assessed by humans, who scored it as around 90 per cent accurate. Facebook's system was trained on a data set of 7.5 billion sentence pairs gathered from the web across 100 languages, though not all the languages had an equal number of sentence pairs. "What I really was interested in was cutting out English as a middle man. Globally there are plenty of regions where they speak two languages that aren't English," says Angela Fan of Facebook AI, who led the work.