5 ms·

??? Google's been doing this at scale for a while.

gwern 9y ago
Google switched Google Translate over just last year, November 2016. Considering Facebook is developing all this internally and the scale they operate at and the presumable hardware disadvantages (does FB have any equivalent of Google's TPUs?), switching over in production so quickly is impressive.
- kuschku 9y ago
  Only for very few language pairs, though. But for those translation massively improved, especially for German the old solution was basically unusable.
zitterbewegung 9y ago
Google was doing a statistical method of translation for a long time for Google Translate. Last year they switched over to Neural Machine Translation.
dmcy22 9y ago
Google only supports Neural Machine Translation for a subset of languages. Whereas as Facebook is doing it for 2,000 translation directions.
- Retric 9y ago
  45 languages * 44 other langues ~= 2000 translation directions. There are ~4,500 languages with more than 1,000 speakers ~4,500 * 4,499 ~= 20,254,500 language pairs so that's a very long way from every language.
  - hood_syntax 9y ago
    Frankly though, I imagine the vast majority of those languages are unappealing targets in terms of return on investment.
    - flamedoge 9y ago
      and much smaller training data..
  - actuator 9y ago
    I guess they really don't need to cover all of them though as most of the people speaking a language with low number of speakers would be able to converse in other mainstream languages as well. I can speak four languages but I rarely converse in two of them as speakers of the two languages are usually comfortable with a mainstream language as well.
  - jacquesm 9y ago
    Even Swedish is barely in the top 100 with 8.7 million speakers.
  - rjeli 9y ago
    The most obvious thing to me is to use an intermediate language - I assume this has already been discussed extensively, anyone have references? edit: I should have scrolled down https://techcrunch.com/2016/11/22/googles-ai-translation-tool-seems-to-have-invented-its-own-secret-internal-language/ https://techcrunch.com/2016/11/22/googles-ai-translation-too...
- riku_iki 9y ago
  Google may also have higher bar for translation quality..
deleted 9y ago
[deleted]

Google switched Google Translate over just last year, November 2016. Considering Facebook is developing all this internally and the scale they operate at and the presumable hardware disadvantages (does FB have any equivalent of Google's TPUs?), switching over in production so quickly is impressive.

kuschku 9y ago
Only for very few language pairs, though. But for those translation massively improved, especially for German the old solution was basically unusable.

zitterbewegung 9y ago

Google was doing a statistical method of translation for a long time for Google Translate. Last year they switched over to Neural Machine Translation.

dmcy22 9y ago

Google only supports Neural Machine Translation for a subset of languages. Whereas as Facebook is doing it for 2,000 translation directions.

Retric 9y ago
45 languages * 44 other langues ~= 2000 translation directions. There are ~4,500 languages with more than 1,000 speakers ~4,500 * 4,499 ~= 20,254,500 language pairs so that's a very long way from every language.
- hood_syntax 9y ago
  Frankly though, I imagine the vast majority of those languages are unappealing targets in terms of return on investment.
  - flamedoge 9y ago
    and much smaller training data..
- actuator 9y ago
  I guess they really don't need to cover all of them though as most of the people speaking a language with low number of speakers would be able to converse in other mainstream languages as well. I can speak four languages but I rarely converse in two of them as speakers of the two languages are usually comfortable with a mainstream language as well.
- jacquesm 9y ago
  Even Swedish is barely in the top 100 with 8.7 million speakers.
- rjeli 9y ago
  The most obvious thing to me is to use an intermediate language - I assume this has already been discussed extensively, anyone have references? edit: I should have scrolled down https://techcrunch.com/2016/11/22/googles-ai-translation-tool-seems-to-have-invented-its-own-secret-internal-language/ https://techcrunch.com/2016/11/22/googles-ai-translation-too...
riku_iki 9y ago
Google may also have higher bar for translation quality..

deleted 9y ago

[deleted]