Meta, Inc has begun exploring the full potential of the Metaverse with a new language processing solution, the company announced last week.
The new speech model, XLS-R, is a self-supervised tool which decodes and processes roughly 128 languages to execute numerous speech tasks by learning with around 10 times more hours of public multilingual data, or 436,000 hours of recordings, than previous versions, Meta explained.
We’re releasing XLS-R, a self-supervised multilingual model trained on 128 languages for a variety of speech tasks.
XLS-R sets a new state of the art on several speech recognition benchmarks, foreign-to-English speech translation & language identification.https://t.co/E4TnKIt8BH pic.twitter.com/mU3WKokQnA— Meta AI (@MetaAI) November 18, 2021
The new tool works with several benchmarks, including speech recognition protocols such as CommonVoice, BABEL, VoxPopuli, CoVoST-2, and VoxLingua107 to process multiple languages under a single model.
Speaking on the performance of the new model, Facebook AI said in a blog post,
“We found that our largest model, containing over 2 billion parameters, performs much better than smaller models, since more parameters are critical to adequately represent the many languages in our data set. We also found that larger model size improved performance much more than when pretraining on a single language”
According to the Metaverse firm’s research, XLS-R earned “markedly strong improvements” when encoding non-English languages—a key benchmark for multilingual speech processing.
Low-resource languages also scored higher in translation accuracy with the bilingual evaluation understudy, which was a “very large step forward” to improving spoken language translation.
Meta has released the models with Hugging Face for public use on GitHub, it concluded.
Meta Builds Foundation for Metaverse Tools
XLS-R is one of Meta’s growing collection of tools for developing the Metaverse, the ubiquitous communication platform merging physical and digital content which to succeed the Internet.
The news comes after Meta rebranded Facebook, shifting the enterprise to a “Metaverse company,” Chief Executive and Founder Mark Zuckerberg revealed at the Connect event in late October.
Meta also unveiled a trove of new communcation platforms, agendas, and later, developing haptic glove solutions to bring Metaverse solutions for research, companies, customers, and users.
