Facebook Plans to Boost Its Translations Using Neural Networks This Year

Facebook is working to get significantly better at automatically translating updates from friends not written in your native language. The social network plans to roll out a new translation system later this year. It is based on artificial neural networks, an approach to machine learning that has recently caused Facebook and others to invest heavily in artificial intelligence (see "10 Breakthrough Technologies 2013: Deep Learning"). Alan Packer, director of engineering for Facebook's language technology team, said Monday that neural networks are able to produce more natural-sounding translations than statistical machine translation, the technology that underpins most translation software today. Packer said that neural networks may also be better at learning how to translate idioms and metaphors into their equivalents in other languages.