9/28 Weekly Seminar: Paco Guzmán
September 25, 2023
Paco is Research Scientist Manager supporting translation teams in Meta AI (FAIR). He works in the field of machine translation with the aim to break language barriers. He joined Meta in 2016 and has co-led several initiatives (e.g. SeamlessM4T, NLLB , FLORES). His research has been published in top-tier NLP venues like ACL, EMNLP. He was the co-chair of the Research director at AMTA (2020-2022) and Ethics co-chair at EMNLP 2023. He has organized several research competitions focused on low-resource translation and data filtering. Paco obtained his PhD from the ITESM in Mexico, was a visiting scholar at the LTI-CMU from 2008-2009 and participated in DARPA’s GALE evaluation program. Paco was a post-doc and scientist at Qatar Computing Research Institute in Qatar in 2012-2016
Machine Translation has the ultimate goal of eliminating language barriers. However, the area has focused mainly on a few languages, leaving many low-resource languages without support. In this talk, I will discuss the challenges of bringing translation support for many written and spoken languages.
First, I talk about the No Language Left Behind Project (NLLB), where we took on this challenge by first contextualizing the need for low-resource language translation support through exploratory interviews with native speakers and building MT models to translate over 200 languages. Then, I'll discuss the challenges of building the next-generation multi-modal translation models with SeamlessM4T our multimodal speech and text translation model.
Our models achieve state-of-the-art performance and lay important groundwork towards realizing a universal translation system. At the same time, we keep making open-source contributions for everyone to keep advancing the research for the languages they care about.