How Meta’s New Machine Aims to Solve Language Barriers In Africa

By Tolulope Oke

Meta has unveiled NLLB-200, a single artificial intelligence (AI) machine that will aid better translation of 55 African Languages across  Facebook, Instagram, and Wikipedia.

According to Business Day, the AI machine was designed with a focus on African languages, an effort to develop high-quality machine translation capabilities for most of the world’s low-resource languages.

Meta explains that AI models need a lot of data to learn, and there isn’t a lot of human-translated training data for these languages.

Despite the fact that more than 20 million people speak and write in Luganda, this written language is extremely difficult to find on the internet.

With respect to that, they collaborated with professional translators for each of these languages to create a reliable benchmark that can automatically assess translation quality for many low-resource languages. The reality is that a few languages dominate the web, so only a fraction of the world can access content and contribute to the web in their native language.

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Meta noted that they aim to change the complexity of the language barrier by developing more inclusionary automatic translation systems, ones that open up access to the web for the more than 4 billion people worldwide who are currently excluded because they do not speak one of the few languages in which information is accessible.

Meta also created a new evaluation dataset, FLORES-200, and measured NLLB-200’s performance in each language. The results revealed that NLLB-200 outperforms the previous state-of-the-art by an average of 44 percent.