5/27/22, 8:18 PM
Integrating autoconversion: Facebook’s path from Zawgyi to Unicode - Engineering at Meta
Last year, to support Myanmar’s transition to Unicode, we removed Zawgyi as an interface language option for new F
and other policy-violating content weren’t going to trip over Zawgyi content and began work on integrating font conv
country continue its transition to Unicode, we are announcing that we’ve implemented font converters in Facebook a
Unicode converter will continue to allow people transitioning to Unicode to read posts, messages, and comments eve
will detail the technical challenges involved in integrating these converters, including how we differentiate Zawgyi tex
how to convert between the two, as well as some lessons we learned along the way.
Facebook post without conversion (left) and with it (right).
Why Unicode?
Unicode was designed as a global system to allow everyone in the world to use their own language on their devices. B
Which means the people using those devices are now dealing with compatibility issues across platforms, operating sy
content producers in Myanmar often post in both Zawgyi and Unicode in a single post, not to mention English or othe
combined renderings; requires twice as many code points to represent only a subset of the script; and vowel code po
which leads to search and comparison problems, even within a single document. This makes any kind of communicati
Facebook supports Unicode because it offers support and a consistent standard for every language. In Myanmar, in p
It allows people in Myanmar to use our apps and services in languages other than Burmese. Zawgyi supports en
spoken in Myanmar, like Shan and Mon.
It offers a normalized form for languages in Myanmar, which helps us protect the people who use our apps by det
tools.
It makes it more efficient for us to review reports of potentially harmful content on Facebook, and content review
encoded.
A three-pronged approach
When we first started looking at Myanmar encoding, our top priority was making sure our systems that detect harmfu
goals for that in this blog post. The same challenges (such as multiple code points and combined renderings) that ma
classifiers and AI systems to effectively detect policy-violating content.
Fortunately, we are not the only company working on this issue, and we were able to use Google’s open source myanm
major upgrade, in terms of accuracy of detection and conversion, over the regex-based library we had been using. Ab
content into Unicode before going through our classifiers. Implementing autoconversion across our products was not
encoding detection, device encoding detection, and conversion — had its own challenges.
https://engineering.fb.com/2019/09/26/android/unicode-font-converter/
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