A Survey of Language Identification Techniques and Applications

Language Identification is the process of determining in which natural language the contents of the text is written. Language identification is always been an important research area which has been carried out from early 1970’s. Still it is a fascinating field to be studied due to increased demand of natural language processing applications. In many applications, it works as a primary step of some larger process. In this paper, a number of applications are outlined where language identification is working successfully. Language Identification can be done using two types of techniques: computational techniques and non-computational techniques. Computational techniques are based on statistical methods and requires large set of training data for each of the language while noncomputational techniques require that researcher must have extensive knowledge about the language to-be-identified. In this paper, a brief review of the few papers is presented which outlines the various statistical and non-statistical techniques that have been applied by the different researchers for language identification. Besides it, different researchers performed language identification for different type of documents such as monolingual, multilingual, long and short and for a particular set of languages.