Evaluation of Language Identification Methods

Language identification plays a major role in several Natural Language Processing applications. It is mostly used as an important preprocessing step. Various approaches have been made to master the task. Recognition rates have tremendously increased. Today identification rates of up to 99 % can be reached even for small input. The following paper will give an overview about the approaches, explain how they work, and comment on their accuracy. In the remainder of the paper, three freely available language identification programs are tested and evaluated.