NLLB-200, a single AI machine that translates across 200 different languages, including 55 African languages with state-of-the-art results, has been unveiled by Meta to improve and extend translations on Facebook, Instagram, and Wikipedia.
The AI machine was designed with a focus on African languages, an effort to develop high-quality machine translation capabilities for most of the world’s low-resource languages.
“Africa is a continent with very high linguistic diversity, and language barriers exist day to day. We are pleased to announce that 55 African languages will be included in this machine translation research, making it a major breakthrough for our continent,” Balkissa Ide Siddo, Public Policy Director for Africa said while speaking about the launch of the AI model.
He further stressed that imagine visiting your favourite Facebook group in the future, coming across a post in Igbo or Luganda, and being able to understand it in your own language with just a click of a button – that’s where we hope research like this leads us. Highly accurate translations in more languages could also help to spot harmful content and misinformation, protect election integrity, and curb instances of online sexual exploitation and human trafficking.
According to the platform, the 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. However, more than 20 million people speak and write in Luganda but this written language is extremely difficult to find on the internet.
Meta noted that they worked with professional translators for each of these languages to develop a reliable benchmark that can automatically assess translation quality for many low-resource languages, the reality is that a handful of languages dominate the web, so only a fraction of the world can access content and contribute to the web in their own language.
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The platform noted that they intend to change the difficulty in language barrier by creating more inclusive machine translation systems, ones that unlock access to the web for the more than 4B people around the world that are currently excluded because they do not speak one of the few languages content is available.
Mark Zuckerberg, CEO of Meta stated in a post on his Facebook page that AI is improving all of our services. We just open-sourced an AI model we built that can translate across 200 different languages — many of which aren’t supported by current translation systems, calling the project ‘No Language Left Behind’, and the AI modeling techniques used are helping make high-quality translations for languages spoken by billions of people around the world.
“ Communicating across languages is one superpower that AI provides, but as we keep advancing our AI work it’s improving everything we do — from showing the most interesting content on Facebook and Instagram, to recommending more relevant ads, to keeping our services safe for everyone,” he said.
To confirm that the translations are high quality, Meta also created a new evaluation dataset, FLORES-200, and measured NLLB-200’s performance in each language, results revealed that NLLB-200 exceeds the previous state of the art by an average of 44 percent.
The platform is also open-sourcing the NLLB-200 model and publishing a slew of research tools to enable other researchers to extend this work to more languages and build more inclusive technologies. Meta AI is also providing up to $200,000 of grants to non-profit organizations for real-world applications for NLLB-200.
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