According to the reports that we got from our sources, Facebook recently made an announcement that it has bought an artificial intelligence firm called Bloomsbury AI based in London that specializes in the processing of natural language. In accordance with a post that was put up in the official Facebook Academics page, Facebook stated that Bloomsbury’s “expertise will strengthen Facebook’s efforts in natural language processing research, and help us further understand natural language and its applications.” This ultimately means that as Facebook goes along to hand over extra moderation duties of the platform to algorithms, the foundation of AI technology that is supporting those algorithms still has a lot more work to do.
In the community of artificial intelligence, Facebook is one of the biggest companies as it has positions in the Facebook AI Research or FAIR, and it also happens to be the company that commands huge salaries and projects that hover around the critical areas of deep learning, processing of natural language and other well-known sub-fields. The big objective for Facebook is to have AI that has depth in the understanding of images, videos and text so that it can moderate the whole platform of the social network as effectively as possible.
At the moment, a lot of human beings have been given the task of overseeing Facebook content. Their job is to inspect materials that have been flagged and reported and to make decisions on what they consider as hate speeches or fake news, and posts in violations of Facebook’s rules. The truth however is that, the more Facebook increases its AI capabilities, algorithms will have to do more of the work. Although, before they get to that point, Facebook will need its software to understand languages better, the intention that was behind that language, as well as all other tricky problems that most modern AI technologies are not yet able to handle.
There is no certainty as regards the position Bloomsbury will take, however, Bloomsbury AI co-founder Sebastian Riedel was among those who created Factmata which was designed to help remove fake news. Facebook has a FAIR unit in its offices in London, and according to the post, Bloomsbury’s work has for now only been focused on “machine reading and understanding unstructured documents in natural language in order to answer any question.”
