Performing Language Detection

What is language detection?

Azure Language service also offers functionality to detect the language in which the text is written. The Language Detection feature is very helpful in applications where there are chances of multilingual text or documents.

In the field of Natural Language Processing, we may need to work with data sets that contain data in different languages. Many NLP algorithms are trained with data sets of specific languages and hence it becomes a valuable option to determine the language of the data set before running any algorithm on it.

These kinds of language prediction systems are widely used in electronic devices such as mobiles, laptops, etc for machine translation, and also on robots to identify the language and then understand its meaning to take the corresponding action. Also, in web search, detecting the language of the web pages that a web crawler has crawled becomes really important as it only makes sense to show the search results in the same language in which the user has written the query.

Azure language detection can detect a wide range of lanaguges and their regional variations. A complete list of the languages that are supported by Azure can be found at Language support for Language Detection.

Implementation

Now let’s implement the language detection feature using the Azure Language SDK.