Facebook Translates with Neural Nets

Another example  of how the power of this tech is expanding.  Some interesting details here.

Two versions of a Facebook post Facebook Translations Now Rely Entirely on Neural Networks in SiliconANGLE  by Eric David

" ... Facebook on Wednesday announced its translations are now wholly dependent on state-of-the-art machine-learning neural networks. A team of Facebook researchers says these networks manage more than 2,000 translation directions and 4.5 billion translations daily, generating more accurate translations than Facebook's previous system, which used phrase-based machine translation models. Neural machine translation gauges the complete content of a message together, which is more resource-intensive than phrase-based translation but typically results in a more fluent translation. Facebook also says neural machine translation can handle unknown or misspelled words with greater proficiency, as it can examine contextual clues to determine a word's intended meaning. Facebook thinks convolutional neural networks (CNN) can realize the same accuracy in translation as recurrent neural networks, but significantly faster. In May, the company announced that its CNN-based system was nine times faster than existing networks, and Facebook researchers note CNNs are a better fit for the newest machine-learning hardware. ... "