Facebook translations are now entirely powered by AI

Facebook has been working on changing how it translates text in posts and comments and today it announced that its transition is complete. It means that translations should be quite a bit more accurate going forward. Previously, Facebook was using phrase-based machine translation models, which break down sentences into words or phrases, limiting how they can go about translating a full sentence. These sorts of models' shortcomings were particularly evident when translating between languages with really different sentence structures. Now, however, the site is using neural networks to power its translations, which can take into account full sentences as well as their context, generating much more accurate translations.