I've been using LASER from Facebook Research via https://github.com/yannvgn/laserembeddings to accept multi-lingual input in front of the the domain-specific models for recommendations and stuff (that are trained on English annotated examples).
This sounds interesting. Can you share more please?
It sounds like there is some multilingual input text on the basis of which you make recommendations, but I think you would have called that a search engine rather than recommender.
That's true, I'm making recommendations based on Multinomial Naive Bayes (and SGDClassifier) over custom TF-IDF bags of words, so it is like search plus text classification. And some endpoints do just check the cosine or Jaccard distance between things. There is a lot of overlap between search and NLP.
My approach to AI is somewhat conservative because of working in a law-adjacent field where explainability is paramount. When it comes to getting "smart" I prefer forward-chaining logic over facts, and facts include predictions from models too. But at least there is a "judge"/engine to coordinate how the predictions from the ensemble of models maps to actions. I love me some pertained neural nets, but use them more as black box appliances.