Detect language of text

Is there any C# library which can detect the language of a particular piece of text? i.e. for an input text "This is a sentence", it should detect the language as "English". Or for "Esto es una sentencia" it should detect the language as "Spanish".

I understand that language detection from text is not a deterministic problem. But both Google Translate and Bing Translator have an "Auto detect" option, which best-guesses the input language. Is there something similar available publicly, preferably in C#?

c# language-detection

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Here you have a simple detector based on bigram statistics (basically means learning from a big set which bigrams occur more frequently on each language and then count those in a piece of text, comparing to your previously detected values):

http://allantech.blogspot.com/2007/07/automatic-language-detection.html

This is probably good enough for many (most?) applications and doesn't require Internet access.

Of course it will perform worse than Google's or Bing's algorithm (which themselves aren't great). If you need excellent detection performance you would have to do both a lot of hard work and over huge amounts of data.

The other option would be to leverage Google's or Bing APIs if your app has Internet access.

answered 2009-09-23T07:18:56.233

Detect language of text

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