Meta partners with UNESCO to improve AI language technology
An open-source machine translation benchmark will help assess AI performance in seven languages.
Meta has launched a new initiative with UNESCO to enhance AI language recognition and translation, focusing on underserved languages. The Language Technology Partner Program invites collaborators to provide speech recordings, transcriptions, and translated texts to help train AI models. The finalised models will be open-sourced, allowing broader accessibility and research.
The government of Nunavut in Canada is among the early partners, contributing recordings in Inuktut, a language spoken by some Indigenous communities. Meta is also releasing an open-source machine translation benchmark to evaluate AI performance across seven languages, available on Hugging Face.
While Meta presents the initiative as a philanthropic effort, improved AI language tools could benefit the company’s broader goals. Meta AI continues to expand multilingual support, including automatic translation for content creators. However, the company has faced criticism for its handling of non-English content, with reports highlighting inconsistencies in content moderation across languages.
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