Hey all, I work on this project. Full list of languages can be found here: https://github.com/facebookresearch/flores/tree/main/flores2...
As well as in the research paper: https://research.facebook.com/publications/no-language-left-...
No Language Left Behind
61–70 of 166 posts
Re: No Language Left Behind
#62Jeff 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!
Hey Jeff, I’m a native speaker of Dhivehi — the language spoken by the people of Maldives. Since I couldn’t find a full list of supported languages I was wondering if Dhivehi is / would be integrated.
Dhivehi is currently not supported, unfortunately. We view this as a starting point and are committed to expanding to many other languages as in the spirit of our project name.
Full list of currently supported languages can be found here: https://github.com/facebookresearch/flores/tree/main/flores2...
Re: No Language Left Behind
#63Earlier quoted context omitted.
The point is that there are lots of humans who speak these languages and use tech. They just don’t use Wikipedia so getting a good translation corpus going was harder.
And it's both cumulative across all those languages (see above), cheap/amortized (if you can do a good multilingual NMT for 50 languages, how hard can 50+1 languages be?), and many of those languages are likely to grow both in terms of sheer population and in GDP. (Think about South Asian or African countries like Indonesia or Nigeria.) The question isn't why are FB & Google investing so much in powerful multilingual…
what other entities would really have access to the text resources that FB & Google? outside of a few other large companies I can't imagine many
Re: No Language Left Behind
#64I'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 t…
It's an extremely difficult problem indeed. A lot of people on the team speak low-resource languages too (my native language as well!), so definitely resonate with what you're saying. My overall feeling is: yeah it's hard, and after decades we can't even do German translation perfectly. But if we don't work on it, it's not gonna happen. I really hope that people who are excited about technology for more languages can…
> But if we don't work on it, it's not gonna happen.
That’s exactly right. There’s too much bias in society that if something isn’t perfect, then why bother? Nothing is perfect, so with that attitude there can be no progress. Thank you for doing important work!
Re: No Language Left Behind
#65Note that very recently Google has done something very similar: "Building Machine Translation Systems for the Next Thousand Languages": https://arxiv.org/abs/2205.03983 https://ai.googleblog.com/2022/05/24-new-languages-google-tr... The Facebook paper has some direct comparison to that work.
Evaluation was important to us, and we really wanted to have a benchmark that covers all 200 languages
Re: No Language Left Behind
#66I'll know AI translators are any good when the United Nations starts using them
"Skills required: United Nations translators are required to have a perfect command of their main language and an excellent knowledge of, in most cases, two other official languages"
Re: No Language Left Behind
#67The analogy I like the most is that they've found the "shape" of languages in high dimensions, and if you rotate the shape for English the right way, you get an unreasonably good fit for the shape of Spanish, again for all the other languages. We're at a point where it's now possible to determine the shape of every language, provided there are enough speakers of the language left who are both able and willing to help…
The shape analogy doesn't really apply with modern language models. Each word gets its own context dependent high dimensional point. With everything being context dependent, simple transformations like rotations are impossible. A more accurate perception is that any concept expressible in language now has its own high dimensional representation, which can then be decoded into any other language.
Re: No Language Left Behind
#68I'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.
We think it's important for AI to truly support everyone in the world. A world where AI only serves a subset of the population is not ideal. In machine translation, this means supporting as many language as possible at high quality. We also imagine a future where anyone will be able to communicate with anyone else seamlessly; this also means solving translations for all languages.
Wouldn't that also entail a bot speaking in any language?
Re: No Language Left Behind
#69I was two sentences in before I realized the headline wasn’t “No Luggage Left Behind”
this is actually our recurring joke for our team meeting offsites!
Re: No Language Left Behind
#70Earlier quoted context omitted.
I think it will interesting when it runs into a language (e.g. Dakota) where the women and men speak differently. Should be an interesting test.
Doesn't seem to be a big issue for Arabic, where verbs are gendered (so in the sentence "I am going to the store", the verb "to go" will be either masculine or feminine, reflecting the speaker's gender).
Arabic is the 5th or 6th most spoken language. I think the concern for low resource languages is that nuances like that won't get picked up.