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No Language Left Behind

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Re: No Language Left Behind

#21

Post by jw4ng »

kwhitefoot wrote: post #8

What is a "low resource language"?

hey there, I work on this project. We categorize a language as low-resource if there are fewer than 1M publicly available, de-duplicated bitext samples.

also see section 3, table 1 in the paper: https://research.facebook.com/publications/no-language-left-...

Re: No Language Left Behind

#22

Post by jw4ng »

pesenti wrote: post #20
jw4ng wrote: post #19

Jeff Wang here with my fellow Meta AI colleague Angela Fan from No Languages left Behind, seeing the comments flowing through. If you want to ask us anything, go for it!

Are all the 200x200 translations going directly or is English (or another language) used as an intermediate for some of them?

All translation directions are direct from language X to language Y, with no intermediary. We evaluate the quality through 40,602 different translation directions using FLORES-200. 2,440 directions contain supervised training data created through our data effort, and the remaining 38,162 are zero-shot.

Re: No Language Left Behind

#23

Post by goodside »

btheshoe wrote: post #2

I'm not entirely sure why low resource languages are seen as such a high priority for AI research. It seems that by definition there's little payoff to solving translation for them.

"Low-resource language" isn't just a euphemism for "language almost nobody speaks". There are many languages that are widely spoken but nonetheless are hard to obtain training data for. Getting something like Wikipedia going for a minority language can be a difficult chicken-and-egg problem because users will use English for its completeness/recency, despite their limited fluency, and the native-language Wikipedia remains neglected. So you can end up in a situation where users use one language for social media and another for news/research, and Facebook is in a unique position to care about the former.

Re: No Language Left Behind

#24

Post by Etheryte »

I'll believe it when I actually see it. I'm a native of a reasonably small language spoken by about a million people and never have I ever seen a good automatic translation for it. The only translations that are good are the ones that have been manually entered, and those that match the structure of the manually entered ones. I think the sentiment is laudable and wish godspeed to the people working on this, but for the time being I don't see it becoming a reality yet. When Google Translate regularly struggles even with big pairs such as German-English-German, I have reservations about someone making it work for languages where datasets are orders of magnitude smaller.

Re: No Language Left Behind

#25

Post by hello_im_angela »

TaupeRanger wrote: post #13

So they have a system that can translate to languages for which there isn't as much data as English, Spanish, etc. Waiting for a Twitter thread from a native speaker of one of these "low resource languages" to let us know how good the actual translations are. Cynically, I'd venture that they hired some native speakers to cherry pick their best translations for the story books. But mostly this just seems like a nice b…

If you're curious to try the system yourself, it's actually being used to help Wikipedia editors write articles for low-resource language Wikipedias: https://twitter.com/Wikimedia/status/1544699850960281601

Re: No Language Left Behind

#26

Post by dangom »

jw4ng wrote: post #19

Jeff Wang here with my fellow Meta AI colleague Angela Fan from No Languages left Behind, seeing the comments flowing through. If you want to ask us anything, go for it!

What is the greatest insight you gained and could share with non-experts from working on this project?

Re: No Language Left Behind

#27

Post by Tabular-Iceberg »

My concern with this is that in low resource languages the unavoidable biases of the ML models might overpower their own organic development.

We shrug off all the little quirks of machine translated text because it usually gets the point across, and we recognize them as quirks because most of what we read was written by real people with no such quirks. But when most of what you read contain those quirks, I fear those will quickly become the standard way of writing and even speaking in those languages.

Re: No Language Left Behind

#29

Post by onurcel »

TaupeRanger wrote: post #13

So they have a system that can translate to languages for which there isn't as much data as English, Spanish, etc. Waiting for a Twitter thread from a native speaker of one of these "low resource languages" to let us know how good the actual translations are. Cynically, I'd venture that they hired some native speakers to cherry pick their best translations for the story books. But mostly this just seems like a nice b…

in this work we tried to rely not only on automated evaluation scores but also on human evaluation for exactly this reason: we wanted to have a better understanding of how our model actually performs and how it correlates to automated scores.

Re: No Language Left Behind

#30

Post by pagekicker »

jw4ng wrote: post #19

Jeff Wang here with my fellow Meta AI colleague Angela Fan from No Languages left Behind, seeing the comments flowing through. If you want to ask us anything, go for it!

Hi, I'm putting together an online event called 31 Days of AI for Book-Lovers to coincide with US National Book Month, October 2022. I was struck by the specific call-out to translating literature on your demo page and would like to feature a specifically book-related application of NLLB on one of 'anchor days'. Can someone work with me on this?
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