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.

Machine learning has proved useful in many software disciplines, including computer vision, speech and audio processing, natural language processing, robotics and some other fields. However, its applicability has been significantly hampered due its black-box nature and significant resource consumption. Performance is achieved at the expense of enormous computational resource and usually compromising the robustness and trustworthiness of the model. Recent researches have been identifying a lack of interactivity as the prime source of these machine learning problems. Consequently, interactive machine learning (iML) has acquired increased attention of researchers on account of its human-in-the-loop modality and relatively efficient resource utilization. Thereby, a state-of-the-art review of interactive machine learning plays a vital role in easing the effort toward building human-centred models. In this paper, we provide a comprehensive analysis of the state-of-the-art of iML. We analyze salient research works using merit-oriented and application/task oriented mixed taxonomy. We use a bottom-up clustering approach to generate a taxonomy of iML research works. Research works on adversarial black-box attacks and corresponding iML based defense system, exploratory machine learning, resource constrained learning, and iML performance evaluation are analyzed under their corresponding theme in our merit-oriented taxonomy. We have further classified these research works into technical and sectoral categories. Finally, research opportunities that we believe are inspiring for future work in iML are discussed thoroughly.

Speech segmentation, which splits long speech into short segments, is essential for speech translation (ST). Popular VAD tools like WebRTC VAD have generally relied on pause-based segmentation. Unfortunately, pauses in speech do not necessarily match sentence boundaries, and sentences can be connected by a very short pause that is difficult to detect by VAD. In this study, we propose a speech segmentation method using a binary classification model trained using a segmented bilingual speech corpus. We also propose a hybrid method that combines VAD and the above speech segmentation method. Experimental results revealed that the proposed method is more suitable for cascade and end-to-end ST systems than conventional segmentation methods. The hybrid approach further improved the translation performance.

In task-oriented dialogue (ToD), a user holds a conversation with an artificial agent  with the aim of completing a concrete task. Although this technology represents one of  the central objectives of AI and has been the focus of ever more intense research and  development efforts, it is currently limited to a few narrow domains (e.g., food ordering,  ticket booking) and a handful of languages (e.g., English, Chinese). This work provides an  extensive overview of existing methods and resources in multilingual ToD as an entry point  to this exciting and emerging field. We find that the most critical factor preventing the  creation of truly multilingual ToD systems is the lack of datasets in most languages for  both training and evaluation. In fact, acquiring annotations or human feedback for each  component of modular systems or for data-hungry end-to-end systems is expensive and  tedious. Hence, state-of-the-art approaches to multilingual ToD mostly rely on (zero- or  few-shot) cross-lingual transfer from resource-rich languages (almost exclusively English),  either by means of (i) machine translation or (ii) multilingual representations. These  approaches are currently viable only for typologically similar languages and languages with  parallel / monolingual corpora available. On the other hand, their effectiveness beyond these  boundaries is doubtful or hard to assess due to the lack of linguistically diverse benchmarks  (especially for natural language generation and end-to-end evaluation). To overcome this  limitation, we draw parallels between components of the ToD pipeline and other NLP tasks,  which can inspire solutions for learning in low-resource scenarios. Finally, we list additional  challenges that multilinguality poses for related areas (such as speech, fluency in generated  text, and human-centred evaluation), and indicate future directions that hold promise to  further expand language coverage and dialogue capabilities of current ToD systems. 

The rewriting method for text summarization combines extractive and abstractive approaches, improving the conciseness and readability of extractive summaries using an abstractive model. Exiting rewriting systems take each extractive sentence as the only input, which is relatively focused but can lose necessary background knowledge and discourse context. In this paper, we investigate contextualized rewriting, which consumes the entire document and considers the summary context. We formalize contextualized rewriting as a seq2seq with group-tag alignments, introducing group-tag as a solution to model the alignments, identifying extractive sentences through content-based addressing. Results show that our approach significantly outperforms non-contextualized rewriting systems without requiring reinforcement learning, achieving strong improvements on ROUGE scores upon multiple extractors.

We present an efficient framework of corpus for sign language translation. Aided with a simple but dramatic data augmentation technique, our method converts text into annotated forms with minimum information loss. Sign languages are composed of manual signals, non-manual signals, and iconic features. According to professional sign language interpreters, non-manual signals such as facial expressions and gestures play an important role in conveying exact meaning. By considering the linguistic features of sign language, our proposed framework is a first and unique attempt to build a multimodal sign language augmentation corpus (hereinafter referred to as the KoSLA corpus) containing both manual and non-manual modalities. The corpus we built demonstrates confident results in the hospital context, showing improved performance with augmented datasets. To overcome data scarcity, we resorted to data augmentation techniques such as synonym replacement to boost the efficiency of our translation model and available data, while maintaining grammatical and semantic structures of sign language. For the experimental support, we verify the effectiveness of data augmentation technique and usefulness of our corpus by performing a translation task between normal sentences and sign language annotations on two tokenizers. The result was convincing, proving that the BLEU scores with the KoSLA corpus were significant.

Content-Based Image Retrieval (CIR) aims to search for a target image by concurrently comprehending the composition of an example image and a complementary text, which potentially impacts a wide variety of real-world applications, such as internet search and fashion retrieval. In this scenario, the input image serves as an intuitive context and background for the search, while the corresponding language expressly requests new traits on how specific characteristics of the query image should be modified in order to get the intended target image. This task is challenging since it necessitates learning and understanding the composite image-text representation by incorporating cross-granular semantic updates. In this paper, we tackle this task by a novel \underline{\textbf{B}}ottom-up cr\underline{\textbf{O}}ss-modal \underline{\textbf{S}}emantic compo\underline{\textbf{S}}ition (\textbf{BOSS}) with Hybrid Counterfactual Training framework, which sheds new light on the CIR task by studying it from two previously overlooked perspectives: \emph{implicitly bottom-up composition of visiolinguistic representation} and \emph{explicitly fine-grained correspondence of query-target construction}. On the one hand, we leverage the implicit interaction and composition of cross-modal embeddings from the bottom local characteristics to the top global semantics, preserving and transforming the visual representation conditioned on language semantics in several continuous steps for effective target image search. On the other hand, we devise a hybrid counterfactual training strategy that can reduce the model's ambiguity for similar queries.

Meta has unveiled a new AI model called NLLB-200 that can translate 200 languages and improves quality by an average of 44 percent. Translation apps have been fairly adept at the most popular languages for some time. Even when they don't offer a perfect translation, it's normally close enough for the native speaker to understand. However, there are hundreds of millions of people in regions with many languages – like Africa and Asia – that still suffer from poor translation services. "To help people connect better today and be part of the metaverse of tomorrow, our AI researchers created No Language Left Behind (NLLB), an effort to develop high-quality machine translation capabilities for most of the world's languages. Today, we're announcing an important breakthrough in NLLB: We've built a single AI model called NLLB-200, which translates 200 different languages with results far more accurate than what previous technology could accomplish."

Meta's quest to translate underserved languages is marking its first victory with the open source release of a language model able to decipher 202 languages. Named after Meta's No Language Left Behind initiative and dubbed NLLB-200, the model is the first able to translate so many languages, according to its makers, all with the goal to improve translation for languages overlooked by similar projects. "The vast majority of improvements made in machine translation in the last decades have been for high-resource languages," Meta researchers wrote in a paper [PDF]. "While machine translation continues to grow, the fruits it bears are unevenly distributed," they said. According to the announcement of NLLB-200, the model can translate 55 African languages "with high-quality results."

Language is our lifeline to the world. But because high-quality translation tools don't exist for hundreds of languages, billions of people today can't access digital content or participate fully in conversations and communities online in their preferred or native languages. This is particularly an issue for hundreds of millions of people who speak the many languages of Africa and Asia. To help people connect better today and be part of the metaverse of tomorrow, our AI researchers created No Language Left Behind (NLLB), an effort to develop high-quality machine translation capabilities for most of the world's languages. Today, we're announcing an important breakthrough in NLLB: We've built a single AI model called NLLB-200, which translates 200 different languages with results far more accurate than what previous technology could accomplish.