(Yicai Global) May 21 -- Huang Fei, former director of the artificial intelligence translation team of the applied machine learning department at Facebook Inc. has joined China's e-commerce leader Alibaba Group Holdings Ltd. Huang will be in charge of promoting the application of AI translation in the group's New Retail initiative, cross-border e-commerce, video and other fields.

Huang resigned from Facebook to join Alibaba as the Chinese conglomerate has a wealth of application scenarios and can bring more broad research and imagination to the AI translation discipline. "By building a multi-modal architecture including pictures, video and sound, the learning process of AI translation will be closer to that of human language learning," Huang said.

Alibaba formally unveiled a real-time translation function in its cross-border e-commerce system on May 18 to solve the problem of language barriers between sellers and buyers, said industry news outlet Global E-Businessman today. It is the world's first AI translation product for e-commerce, it said. In the previous trial operation phase, Alibaba's AI translation product provided hundreds of millions of translations in 21 popular languages each day.

With the help of Huang, Alibaba will provide real-time voice translation and automatic bilingual subtitle generation for live videos in the second half of this year, the report added. Cross-border merchants using different languages will be able communicate directly through video.

Data provided by Alibaba show that 70 percent of sellers in its cross-border e-commerce system communicate in English and the remaining 30 percent communicate in other languages. Some 96 percent of sellers are unable to solve issues that need to be addressed in other languages, and transactions of more than 400 million items of goods involve translation process.

Editor: Mevlut Katik