San Francisco, Jul 3 (IANS): Facebook is reportedly acquiring London-based startup Bloomsbury AI that has developed natural language processing (NLP) technology to help machines answer questions.

According to a report in Tech Crunch on Monday, "multiple sources say Facebook is paying between $23 million and $30 million to acquire Bloomsbury AI".

The social media giant aims to deploy the Bloomsbury AI technology to work on fighting fake news, the report added.

Facebook was yet to comment to the report.

Facebook recently announced that it was using AI to remove posts from its platform that involve hate speech, nudity, graphic violence, terrorist content, spam, fake accounts and suicide.

"We view AI as a foundational technology, and we've made deep investments in advancing the state of the art through scientist-directed research," Facebook said in a statement.

At its F8 developer conference in May, Facebook's AI research and engineering teams shared a recent breakthrough: the teams successfully trained an image recognition system on a data set of 3.5 billion publicly available photos, using the hashtags on those photos in place of human annotations.

After making deep investments in AI technology, Facebook has also announced the next version of its open-source AI framework for developers.