Meta's AI machine translation research to help break language barriers

Meta has announced that it has built and open-sourced'No Language Left Behind' NLLB-200, a single Artificial Intelligence (AI) model that is the first to translate across 200 different languages, including 55 African languages with state-of-the-art results. Meta is using the modelling techniques and learnings from the project to improve and extend translations on Facebook, Instagram, and Wikipedia. In an effort to develop high-quality machine translation capabilities for most of the world's low-resource languages, this single AI model was designed with a focus on African languages. They are challenging from a machine translation perspective. AI models require lots and lots of data to help them learn, and there's not a lot of human-translated training data for these languages.