Microsoft's new Z-code models, which use a 'Mixture of Experts' approach, are meant to make Translator and other Microsoft AI services perform better and be more efficient to run.

Figure 1: Microsoft Azure AI services with Z Code model.

Figure 1 shows that Microsoft is updating its Translator and other Azure AI services with a set of AI models called Z-code, officials announced on March 22.

These updates will improve the quality of machine translations, as well as help these services support more than just the most common languages that have less available training data.

Microsoft recently deployed Z-code models to improve common language-understanding tasks like name entity recognition, text summarization, custom text classification and key phrase extraction across its various Azure AI services. [1]

The Z-code-based translation model is available now, first by invitation to customers using document translation in Translator, a Microsoft Azure Cognitive Service and part of Azure AI.

Microsoft says Z-code is part of the company’s larger XYZ-code initiative designed to combine models for text, vision, audio and multiple languages to create more powerful and integrative AI systems that can speak, hear, see and understand people better.

Xuedong Huang, Microsoft’s technical fellow and Azure AI chief technology officer, says the company’s goal is to help everyone and every organization communicate better via improved translations.[2]

Transfer learning is a technique that permits effective knowledge exchange across related languages. The team uses transfer learning in new Z-code models.

During the training process, the models use both parallel and monolingual data. This expands the possibilities for high-quality machine translation beyond high-resource languages.

In addition, it also improves the quality of low-resource languages with limited training data. Because both high-resource and low-resource languages show advances, this strategy can positively impact AI fairness.[3]

References:

1. https://www.zdnet.com/article/microsoft-improves-translator-and-azure-ai-services-with-new-ai-z-code-models/
2. https://mytechdecisions.com/it-infrastructure/microsoft-z-code/
3. https://www.marktechpost.com/2022/03/26/microsoft-enhances-its-translator-a-microsoft-azure-cognitive-service-with-z-code-mixture-of-experts-moe-models-to-boost-efficiency-and-quality/

Cite this article:

Sri Vasagi K (2022), Microsoft Enhance Translator with New AI Z Code, p.p 73