Facebook's new AI aims to destroy the language barrier

Language translation has typically been done by recurrent neural networks (RNN), which process language one word at a time in a linear order, either right-to-left or left-to-right, depending on the language. This CNN-based architecture pays attention to words farther along in a sentence to help understand the meaning from context farther along the string of words, much like humans do. Facebook hopes to use the new methodology to scale its translation efforts to cover "more of the world's 6,500 languages." Now that the popular social network has chosen CNN translation processing architecture, it will be interesting to see what comes next.