How Can a Language Detector Help Your Company?

In today’s digital and globalized markets, a language detector or identifier is essential for companies operating in multilingual business ecosystems. 

In this way, information from business e-mails, chats, and texts can be prepared and correctly channeled for optimal natural language processing (NLP) to organize data, retrieve it, and understand it.

Consequently, it is essential to know the answer to the following questions: What is a language detector? How does it work and what advantages does it offer a company?

What is a language detector?

A language detector is an algorithmic system that has the ability to determine the source language of a data set.

This automatic detector can work with input text, but there are also systems that work as language detectors on audios or as language detectors on photos.

This language detection mechanism is required in NLP. Why? Because natural language processing applications require a monolingual data input. Therefore, they need to pre-filter the text, detect the language, and translate the content into the target language. 

How do language detectors work?

An automatic language detector is basically a form of language classification that works by comparing preset patterns.

More precisely, the detector works with a base text called a “corpus”. Based on the languages with which it is programmed, it will contain a corpus for each one. 

Thus, when the algorithm senses the input of data, it compares the input text with each corpus, identifies pattern matching and, according to the highest correlation, determines which source language presents the set of information. 

The corpus of the language detector is usually made up of the most common words of a language. For example, a base text for the English language should contain words such as “of”, “the”, and “to”.

But there is no single form of language detection. When the input data is short, there is a lower probability of matching words, so false classifications may occur.

There are other statistical methods, such as:

• Distance measurement. This is a technique in which the comprehensibility of an input text is compared with the comprehensibility of a set of base texts. 

• N-gram models. This method consists of creating a model of encoded characters or bytes for each type of language. When encoded bytes are used, the algorithm is able to create an n-gram model for the text or text fragments (input data) and compare it with all the models recorded for each language type. 

Advantages and disadvantages of using a language detector

The main advantages of using a language detector include the following:

• It can classify and retrieve information and data relevant to a company’s internal processes when these are carried out in multilingual environments, e.g. from e-mails, texts, chats, etc. 

• It facilitates correct natural language processing for optimal information management. 

• It can increase the accuracy of language detection by training the model.

On the other hand, the disadvantage of the automatic language detector is that its accuracy may be affected when comparing similar languages, due to the length of the sentence or the quality of the texts used to train the algorithm. 

The importance of having good technology in language detection

Ensuring maximum accuracy in language detection systems requires state-of-the-art technology, with robust and optimally trained models. 

At Pangeanic, we have developed Pangea Language Detector, a powerful language detection system using neural and statistical technology that guarantees the accuracy of its results, both in detecting the language of the document in general and in each paragraph and fragment. 

The operation of Pangea Language Detector is based on the creation of a multidimensional vector space in the comparison of documents. It also uses the n-gram approach in the calculation of frequencies. In this way, the positions of these vectors are analyzed by our algorithm in order to determine the existing similarities. 

For maximum accuracy, the results are corrected using rigorous linguistic rules that have been created by our team of expert translators and language specialists.

At Pangeanic, we are experts in natural language processing, and we guarantee 95-99% accuracy with our language detector.

Contact us.

We can help you and your company to stand out in the global market.