whatlanguage

by Peter Cooper

Text language detection. Quick, fast, memory efficient, and all in pure Ruby. Uses Bloom filters for aforementioned speed and memory benefits. It works well on texts of over 10 words in length (e.g. blog posts or comments) and very poorly on short or Twitter-esque text, so be aware.

Works with Dutch, English, Farsi, French, German, Italian, Pinyin, Swedish, Portuguese, Russian, Arabic, Finnish, Greek, Hebrew, Hungarian, Korean, Norwegian, Polish and Spanish out of the box.

Important note

This library was first built in 2007 and has received only a few minor updates over the years. There are now more efficient and effective algorithms for doing language detection which I am investigating for a future WhatLanguage.

This library has been updated to be distributed and to work on modern Ruby implementations but other than that, has had no significant improvements.

Synopsis

Full Example

require 'whatlanguage'

texts = []
texts << %q{Deux autres personnes ont été arrêtées durant la nuit}
texts << %q{The links between the attempted car bombings in Glasgow and London are becoming clearer}
texts << %q{En estado de máxima alertaen su nivel de crítico}
texts << %q{Returns the object in enum with the maximum value.}
texts << %q{Propose des données au sujet de la langue espagnole.}
texts << %q{La palabra "mezquita" se usa en español para referirse a todo tipo de edificios dedicados.}
texts << %q{اللغة التي هي هذه؟}
texts << %q{Mitä kieltä tämä on?}
texts << %q{Ποια γλώσσα είναι αυτή;}
texts << %q{באיזו שפה זה?}
texts << %q{Milyen nyelv ez?}
texts << %q{이 어떤 언어인가?}
texts << %q{Hvilket språk er dette?}
texts << %q{W jakim języku to jest?}

texts.each { |text| puts "#{text[0..18]}... is in #{text.language.to_s.capitalize}" }

Initialize WhatLanguage with all filters

wl = WhatLanguage.new(:all)

Return language with best score

wl.language(text)

Return hash with scores for all relevant languages

wl.process_text(text)

Convenience methods on String

"This is a test".language   # => :english
"This is a test".language_iso   # => :en

Initialize WhatLanguage with certain languages

wl = WhatLanguage.new(:english, :german, :french)

Requirements

None, minor libraries (BloominSimple and BitField) included with this release.

Installation

gem install whatlanguage

To test, go into irb, then:

require 'whatlanguage'
"Je suis un homme".language

## Credits

Contributions from Konrad Reiche, Salimane Adjao Moustapha, and others appreciated.

License

MIT License

Copyright (c) 2007-2016 Peter Cooper

Permission is hereby granted, free of charge, to any person obtaining a copy of this software and associated documentation files (the 'Software'), to deal in the Software without restriction, including without limitation the rights to use, copy, modify, merge, publish, distribute, sublicense, and/or sell copies of the Software, and to permit persons to whom the Software is furnished to do so, subject to the following conditions:

The above copyright notice and this permission notice shall be included in all copies or substantial portions of the Software.

THE SOFTWARE IS PROVIDED 'AS IS', WITHOUT WARRANTY OF ANY KIND, EXPRESS OR IMPLIED, INCLUDING BUT NOT LIMITED TO THE WARRANTIES OF MERCHANTABILITY, FITNESS FOR A PARTICULAR PURPOSE AND NONINFRINGEMENT. IN NO EVENT SHALL THE AUTHORS OR COPYRIGHT HOLDERS BE LIABLE FOR ANY CLAIM, DAMAGES OR OTHER LIABILITY, WHETHER IN AN ACTION OF CONTRACT, TORT OR OTHERWISE, ARISING FROM, OUT OF OR IN CONNECTION WITH THE SOFTWARE OR THE USE OR OTHER DEALINGS IN THE SOFTWARE.