Whatlang
Natural language detection for Rust with focus on simplicity and performance.
- Features
- Get started
- Documentation
- Supported languages
- Requirements
- How does it work?
- Running benchmark
- Ports and clones
- Derivation
- License
- Contributors
Features
- Supports 84 languages
- 100% written in Rust
- Lightweight, fast and simple
- Recognizes not only a language, but also a script (Latin, Cyrillic, etc)
- Provides reliability information
Get started
Add to you Cargo.toml:
[dependencies]
whatlang = "0.6.0"
Example:
extern crate whatlang;
use whatlang::{detect, Lang, Script};
fn main() {
let text = "Ĉu vi ne volas eklerni Esperanton? Bonvolu! Estas unu de la plej bonaj aferoj!";
let info = detect(text).unwrap();
assert_eq!(info.lang(), Lang::Epo);
assert_eq!(info.script(), Script::Latin);
assert_eq!(info.confidence(), 1.0);
assert!(info.is_reliable());
}For more details (e.g. how to blacklist some languages) please check the documentation.
Requirements
The latest whatlang library works with rust 1.31.0 or higher.
How does it work?
How does the language recognition work?
The algorithm is based on the trigram language models, which is a particular case of n-grams. To understand the idea, please check the original whitepaper Cavnar and Trenkle '94: N-Gram-Based Text Categorization'.
How is_reliable calculated?
It is based on the following factors:
- How many unique trigrams are in the given text
- How big is the difference between the first and the second(not returned) detected languages? This metric is called
ratein the code base.
Therefore, it can be presented as 2d space with threshold functions, that splits it into "Reliable" and "Not reliable" areas. This function is a hyperbola and it looks like the following one:
For more details, please check a blog article Introduction to Rust Whatlang Library and Natural Language Identification Algorithms.
Running benchmarks
This is mostly useful to test performance optimizations.
cargo bench
Ports and clones
- whatlang-ffi - C bindings
- whatlanggo - whatlang clone for Go language
- whatlang-py - bindings for Python
Derivation
Whatlang is a derivative work from Franc (JavaScript, MIT) by Titus Wormer.