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IPFS News Link • Robots and Artificial Intelligence

Facebook's New AI Engine Understands Text To Improve Messenger, Search And Curation

• http://www.forbes.com

Facebook FB -12.83% has unveiled a new in-house artificial intelligence (AI) engine called "DeepText," built to understand the meaning and sentiment behind text on the social network.

Facebook FB -12.83% said DeepText can understand with "near-human accuracy" the textual content of thousands posts per second in more than 20 languages. This ability is hugely important to Facebook FB -12.83%, where much of the text users post is unstructured and hasn't been categorized or analyzed based on intent or meaning.

The technology, which Facebook announced on Wednesday, has already been used to improve the ability of Messenger chat bots to connect users with cabs, detecting when users make a comment that indicates they need a ride. DeepText can differentiate between, for instance, someone saying, "I just came out of the taxi," and "I need a ride." The engine is also being applied to sales-related text. When a user posts about selling something, DeepText can extract information such as the type of item, its location and the cost, as well as guide the user as to how to promote the sale and where to post.

"If you want to have bots that communicate in a natural and intelligent way, text understanding is a critical piece of technology," Hussein Mehanna, Facebook's FB -12.82% director of core machine learning, said in a phone interview. "People use text as a major form of communication on Ffacebook FB -12.83% There are thousands of posts per second, tens of millions of comments every day. With text understanding we can get closer and closer to human accuracy or near-human understanding."


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