Language Identification Tools

A listing of language identification tools. Language identification can mean both identifiying text type (e.g. news vs literature) and language (e.g. English vs Frisian vs Dutch).

Most of these tools require training on a big corpus (see for corpora per language), but many come with some prebuilt language models.

Free Software

• TextCat
  • http://opus.lingfil.uu.se/tools/public/language_guesser/textcat/LM - language models for the perl version
  • http://olivo.net/software/lc4j/ - a java implementation
• Nutch Language Identifier https://wiki.apache.org/nutch/LanguageIdentifier (Apache license)
• Compact Language Detector for Javascript https://github.com/jaukia/cld-js (3-clause license)
  • doesn't seem to include a method to add new languages, the existing ones were presumably generated by Google

Proprietary

• Google Language Identification API
• Lingua-Systems lid http://www.lingua-systems.com/language-identifier/

See also

• Language Identification (State of the art)
• English Wikipedia on Language detection