“Facebook was not originally created to be a company. It was built to accomplish a social mission – to make the world more open and connected.” – Mark Zuckerberg – Co-founder & CEO – Facebook

Facebook is the world’s most popular social media network. As of September 30^th, 2017, Facebook reported 2.07 billion monthly active users. This is a phenomenal achievement as currently no other company can even dream of boasting a more staggering user base.It is single-handedly responsible for changing the way we interact with our loved ones. Facebook has also changed the very definition of “Friend” as “To friend” is now a verb and although “share” and “like” are used in the same literal sense, Facebook has brought an entirely new weight to the terms.

As the Facebook community grew exponentially over the years, you must have encountered several posts in your Facebook life that were foreign to you. However when such a post appears on your news feed, what do you do? You simply tap a button and translate it to your language. However, akin to a plethora of other online translation services, Facebook’s translation service previously came with a caveat: it didn’t always make sense. After all, creating highly accurate, seamless translations for some 2 billion audience is a tough nut to crack, especially when it comes to accounting for intent, abbreviations, typos, slang, and context simultaneously! However, when Facebook decided to up their game and bring in the power of neural networks, they might have revamped the translations arena a whole notch up!

Here’s an example to prove the power of translations for Facebook audience: Italy drew level with Sweden 0-0 on 13^th November, 2017 and that was enough for them to miss the football world cup in 2018 for the first time in 60 years. This generated lots of negative reaction from people all over the world on the social media. Facebook and Twitter were abuzz with angry fans asking to sack the big names who failed to qualify for the FIFA’s flagship tournament. Fans across the globe were able to exchange views on this issue and transcend all language barriers, thanks to Facebook translation.

Related Read: How Facebook Algorithms Work and How You Can Increase Your Organic Reach

A Revolutionary New Translation Tool

Facebook’s translation tool, as we knew it, was launched in 2011 and Microsoft’s Bing was responsible for performing the translations at that time. In the beginning, Facebook users were able to use a Translation button next to the comments written out in any language other than English,and the translation would pop up in a separate window. Only recently, Facebook performs over 4.5 billion automatic translations and capitalizes on neural networks to achieve this mammoth task smoothly and more accurately.

Earlier this year in May, Mark Zuckerberg gave us a glimpse of what’s coming our way. He stated:“Today we’re publishing research on how AI can deliver better language translations. With a new neural network, our AI research team was able to translate more accurately between languages, while also being nine times faster than current methods.”

So what’s so cool about this feature and how will it revolutionize the way we translate text on the Internet? After all, we can use Google translate and other free services. Facebook has immense faith in this system as they believe this new tool can change the way people usethe translation services on the Internet. So from the simple phrase-based machine translation model, Facebook’s approach now relies on neural networks. Let me define this aspect in detail now so everyone can understand why Facebook has great hopes for the future.

Incorporating Neural Networks for Translation

Facebook has incorporated neural networks in its translation tool, which is a complex mathematical system capable of learning tasks by analyzing copious amounts of data. If you are still hiding under a rock and are oblivious to this earth shattering discovery, let me tell you that this technique is already in use in several other fields and has helped evolve image and speech recognition for the better. Similarly, now it is being used by Facebook for overhauling machine translations.

Facebook is banking upon Convolutional Neural Networks (CNN), a technique invented by Yann LeCun, an experienced researcher who now heads Facebook’s AI lab. CNN can analyze many different pieces concurrently and then organize those smithereens into a logical hierarchy. It is akin to the long Short-term memory network (LSTM) which we are coming on to next.

Google also attempted at making use of neural networks when in 2016, it unveiled a new translation system based on this burgeoning innovation. Google successfully surpassed existing models at that time such as the ones being used by Microsoft. Now Facebook is trying to climb a notch up and use neural networks to incorporate AI in its translation services. This is how it plans to account for typos, slang, context, etc. LSTM is what makes Facebook Translations impeccable.

Related Read: How to Create a Compelling Facebook Post

How Long Short-term memory network (LSTM) works?

The attention span is the key difference between the old system and the new. Phrase based translation is now being replaced by neural networks, which can take into factor whole sentences at a time. In this way, LSTM, a particular sort of machine learning component, is being applied now. The benefits are pretty clear as we get an accurate sentence after translation,retaining the full context of the original one.

Compare these two Turkish-to-English translations to glean a complete picture of the evolution. The picture below comes from the flawed phrase based system, while the one below it comes from the new system.

The company’s explanation in this regard is what makes it quite interesting: “When a word in a sentence doesn’t have a direct corresponding translation in a target language, the neural system will generate a placeholder for the unknown word. A translation of that word is searched for in a sort of in-house dictionary built from Facebook’s training data, and the unknown word is replaced. This allows abbreviations like “tmrw” to be translated into their intended meaning — “tomorrow.”

“Neural networks open up many future development paths related to adding further context, such as a photo accompanying the text of a post, to create better translations,” the company said. “We are also starting to explore multilingual models that can translate many different language directions.”

Final Word

People from across the globe communicate with each other on various groups and forums on Facebook. But the different languages they speak hitherto created a hurdle in ensuring smooth communication. Facebook Translation is being billed by the company as the ultimate solution for this problem. Facebook has not only published a paper describing the working of this tool but also generously shared the code with everyone else,making it an open-source tool. So we can rightly anticipate new features in Facebook Translation in a not so distant future.

As Facebook Translation is still evolving as a tool, I am sure most of you are not aware of how it can benefit you as an individual or a small company/startup. Feel free to come up with any question in your mind so that I can answer it. You can also give your valuable feedback for this blog using the comments section below.

The post Facebook’s AI-Based Translation Tool is All Set to Transcend Linguistic Barriers appeared first on Branex Official Blog.

In 13 years’ time and the CEO as grown his social network from a Harvard dorm room to nearly 2 billion users and growing. Facebook has an identified mission of connecting the world together and for which the social network is now working on drones and other methods to bring internet connectivity to the unreached parts of the globe.

Zuckerberg has total control on the future of the popular social media network due to his majority voting rights. Zuckerberg has also joined the league of Jeff Bezos, Bill Gates and Warren Buffet as one of the richest persons of this planet.

Mark Zuckerberg has also committed to give away 99% of his wealth before he dies. Together with his wife Priscilla Chan he has already poured millions of dollars into education efforts globally and has promised billions more to initiatives related to curing the diseases in the world.

We have collected some highlights from Mark’s modest beginnings from Palo Alto, New York to becoming one of the most famous and powerful CEOs in the world:

Mark Zuckerberg was raised in an old fashioned town of Dobbs Ferry, New York. He was born to Edward and Karen Zuckerberg who were a dentist and psychiatrist by profession, respectively. Along with him, Edard and Karen had three more kids namely Randi, Donna and Arielle.

Mark was an intelligent child since birth. At the age of 12 he created a messaging program named “Zucknet” using Atari basic. He also used to code computer games for his friends at a young age.

Mark was an intelligent child since birth. At the age of 12 he created a messaging program named “Zucknet” using Atari basic. He also used to code computer games for his friends at a young age.

While he was at the renowned Phillips Exeter Academy in New Hampshire, he built an early music streaming platform, which both AOL and Microsoft showed interest in, however still in his teenage he rejected offers for an acquisition or a job.

His interests were not limited to computer programming only. In his early days he also became the captain of the Fencing team at his high school.

Soon after he started at Harvard University in 2002, he became famous for being a skilled developer. His first hit was “Face mash”, which was a hot-or-not style face app that used the pictures of his classmates that he hacked from the school administration dormitory ID files. It instantly got him 22,000 page views from 450 people within the first hour only. However, Harvard University ordered it to be taken down due to copyright and security concerns.

Facebook was started by him from his dorm room at the university with the help of his friends. He soon dropped out from the university to focus on the venture full time.

But before dropping out of the university, he met his now-wife Priscilla Chan. Priscilla told “Today’s” Savannah Guthrie that they met at a frat party on their first date, he told her that he would rather want to go on a date with her than complete his take-home mid-term.

Mark Zuckerberg was not always the refined gentleman as he is today. In the early days of Facebook, he used to carry business cards that read, “I am CEO, Bitch.”

Mark Zuckerberg also got lucky and received a privileged of being immortalized on the big screen. In 2010, ‘The social network’ put a dramatized version of Facebook’s founding story in theaters. It earned eight academy awards nominations however, Zuckerberg strongly maintains that many details portrayed in it were incorrect.

Today, Facebook makes billions of dollars every quarter by showing ads to its users. It has an active user base of nearly 2 billion people at the moment.

Zuckerberg took Facebook public on May 18, 2012. The IPO raised $16 billlion making it not only the biggest tech IPO in history but also made Zuckerberg the 29^th richest man alive overnight.

Priscilla and Mark continued to date throughout the Facebook’s evolution to greatness and finally tied the knotin a relatively low key event soon after the company went public. The event was apparently a surprise wedding which the guests thought was a medical graduation party for Priscilla.

The two enjoyed a high class honey moon in Italy. Flying on a private jet and staying at a 5-star hotel whose room costs €800 per night.

2015 brought a new joy to their lives in form of “Max,” their healthy little girl. “There is so much joy in our little family,” Zuckerberg wrote on Facebook.

They also announced their plan to sell 99% of Zuckerberg’s Facebook stock — worth about $45 billion at the time — to fund a new LCC called the Chan Zuckerberg Initiative. The initiative will funnel the money towards issues like personalized learning, curing diseases, and connecting people.

Even before announcing this massive new effort, he and Chan had committed $1.6 billion to philanthropic causes, including donations to San Francisco General Hospital and the Center for Disease Control.

In September 2016, Chan and Zuckerberg promised $3 billion to curing the world’s diseases by the end of this century. “Can we help scientists to cure, prevent or manage all diseases within our children’s lifetime?” Zuckerberg wrote on Facebook. “I’m optimistic we can.”

At the age of mere 33, Mark Zuckerberg is among the very few people of the elite group who are worth more billions than the number of years in their age, but the famous and rich CEO is far from flashy and embodies a middle class life style.

Apart from philanthropy, Mark likes to spend his money on privacy. In October 2014, he shelled out around $100 million for 750 acres of secluded land on the Hawaiian island of Kauai. He angered locals by trying to force out people who owned small parcels of land sprinkled throughout his estate. He later dropped the lawsuits.

He also bought a $10 million mansion in San Francisco, and then proceeded to spend more than $1 million on remodeling and additions (like a $60,000 greenhouse).

And he is not afraid to spend Facebook’s money either. The company had some major acquisitions under its belt including $1 billion for Instagram, $19 billion for Whatsapp and $2 billion for Oculus. Zuckerberg was turned down by Evan Spiegel, CEO of Snapchat when he was offered to sell the venture to Mark in $3 Billion.

Zuckerberg is also among the people who are in a constant run to meet famous personalities around the globe that included the famous American President, Mr. Barrack Obama himself.

Just recently, in May 2017 Mark and Priscilla announced their second baby who is on the way. WE wish them all the best of luck!

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