<p>Facebook on Monday unveiled software based on machine learning which the company said was the first to be able to translate from any of 100 languages without relying on English.</p>.<p>The open-source artificial intelligence software was created to help the massive social network deliver content better in 160 languages to its more than two billion users around the world.</p>.<p>"This milestone is a culmination of years of Facebook AI's foundational work in machine translation," research assistant Angela Fan said in a blog post.</p>.<p>Fan said the new model is more accurate than other systems because it does not rely on English as an intermediary translation step.</p>.<p>"When translating, say, Chinese to French, most English-centric multilingual models train on Chinese to English and English to French, because English training data is the most widely available," Fan wrote.</p>.<p>"Our model directly trains on Chinese to French data to better preserve meaning. It outperforms English-centric systems by 10 points on the widely used BLEU metric for evaluating machine translations."</p>.<p>Facebook said it already handles an average of 20 billion translations every day on its news feed, and that it hopes the new system will deliver better results.</p>.<p>"Breaking language barriers through machine translation is one of the most important ways to bring people together, provide authoritative information on Covid-19, and keep them safe from harmful content," Fan said.</p>
<p>Facebook on Monday unveiled software based on machine learning which the company said was the first to be able to translate from any of 100 languages without relying on English.</p>.<p>The open-source artificial intelligence software was created to help the massive social network deliver content better in 160 languages to its more than two billion users around the world.</p>.<p>"This milestone is a culmination of years of Facebook AI's foundational work in machine translation," research assistant Angela Fan said in a blog post.</p>.<p>Fan said the new model is more accurate than other systems because it does not rely on English as an intermediary translation step.</p>.<p>"When translating, say, Chinese to French, most English-centric multilingual models train on Chinese to English and English to French, because English training data is the most widely available," Fan wrote.</p>.<p>"Our model directly trains on Chinese to French data to better preserve meaning. It outperforms English-centric systems by 10 points on the widely used BLEU metric for evaluating machine translations."</p>.<p>Facebook said it already handles an average of 20 billion translations every day on its news feed, and that it hopes the new system will deliver better results.</p>.<p>"Breaking language barriers through machine translation is one of the most important ways to bring people together, provide authoritative information on Covid-19, and keep them safe from harmful content," Fan said.</p>