AI translation for Hokkien

[papertowel]

Just saw this:

AI translates Hokkien, an unwritten language, for the first time

This would be really cool to see if it works. They mention multiple times Hokkien not having a written form but I thought Romaji was the most standard. It seems they’re using texts in Mandarin to fuel building the model which is a bit odd.

[hansioux]

Facebook's Hokkien-English translator models

So there are 4 models, a set of Taigi to English and English to Taigi models trained using UnitY, and another two with S2UT (speech-to-unit translation). Both UnitY and S2UT are transformer-based models that divide audio into smaller acoustic units and have the ability to translate without a text transcript for the input audio. In the case of UnitY, the input is first translated to Mandarin text, and then fed into the model again with Taigi audio and Mandarin transcripts to generate the Englis…

I also started a thread on this