Facebook launches AI 'Deep text' with near human understanding

Facebook has launched a new feature 'Deep text' which is capable of understanding 20 different languages with 'near human' intelligence and can also curb spam.

'Deep text', unveiled on June 1 by Facebook is supported by artificial intelligence and can perform functions based on its own learning.

A Facebook press release said: "Text understanding includes multiple tasks, such as general classification to determine what a post is about — basketball, for example — and recognition of entities, like the names of players, stats from a game, and other meaningful information.

But to get closer to how humans understand the text, we need to teach the computer to understand things like slang and word-sense disambiguation. As an example, if someone says, “I like blackberry,” does that mean the fruit or the device?"

'Deep text' is a enhancement over its previously introduced feature 'Deep learning', which had similar characteristics.

Understanding as many languages and concepts would be a significant breakthrough for the social media giant to cater to a larger global audience. 

'Deep text' uses Neuro-Linguistic Programming (NLP) technology, which converts a word into a format that computers can learn from.

The Facebook press note said, "Facebook is also beginning to use high-accuracy, multi-language DeepText models to help people find the right tools for their purpose. For example, someone could write a post that says, “I would like to sell my old bike for $200, anyone interested?” DeepText would be able to detect that the post is about selling something, extract the meaningful information such as the object being sold and its price, and prompt the seller to use existing tools that make these transactions easier through Facebook."

The lingual tool being employed by Facebook is not new to the tech world, however, if the new development is rolled out, it will make the user experience more interactive and systematic.