Introducing DeepText: Facebook’s text understanding engine

This post introduces DeepText, a deep learning-based text understanding engine for Facebook. It details the use of convolutional and recurrent neural networks, word embeddings, and semi-supervised learning to achieve near-human accuracy in understanding text across multiple languages. The post highlights the challenges of traditional NLP for text understanding at scale and in diverse languages, and how deep learning addresses these. It also describes the application of DeepText in Messenger for intent detection and for identifying items for sale, and outlines future research directions including joint text-visual understanding and new neural network architectures.