cld2

R Wrapper for Google's Compact Language Detector 2

CLD2 probabilistically detects over 80 languages in Unicode UTF-8 text, either plain text or HTML/XML. For mixed-language input, CLD2 returns the top three languages found and their approximate percentages of the total text bytes (e.g. 80% English and 20% French out of 1000 bytes)

Installation

This package includes a bundled version of libcld2:

devtools::install_github("ropensci/cld2")

Guess a Language

The function detect_language() returns the best guess or NA if the language could not reliablity be determined.

cld2::detect_language("To be or not to be")
# [1] "ENGLISH"

cld2::detect_language("Ce n'est pas grave.")
# [1] "FRENCH"

cld2::detect_language("Nou breekt mijn klomp!")
# [1] "DUTCH"

Set plain_text = FALSE if your input contains HTML:

cld2::detect_language(url('http://www.un.org/ar/universal-declaration-human-rights/'), plain_text = FALSE)
# [1] "ARABIC"

cld2::detect_language(url('http://www.un.org/zh/universal-declaration-human-rights/'), plain_text = FALSE)
# [1] "CHINESE"

Use detect_language_multi() to get detailed classification output.

detect_language_multi(url('http://www.un.org/fr/universal-declaration-human-rights/'), plain_text = FALSE)
# $classification
#   language code latin proportion
# 1   FRENCH   fr  TRUE       0.96
# 2  ENGLISH   en  TRUE       0.03
# 3   ARABIC   ar FALSE       0.00
# 
# $bytes
# [1] 17008
# 
# $reliabale
# [1] TRUE

This shows the top 3 language guesses and the proportion of text that was classified as this language. The bytes attribute shows the total number of text bytes that was classified, and reliable is a complex calculation on if the #1 language is some amount more probable then the second-best Language.