TinyLD

Tiny Language Detector, simply detect the language of a unicode UTF-8 text:

• pure javascript, no api call, and no dependency (node and browser compatible)
• alternative to libraries like CLD
• blazing fast and low memory footprint (unlike ML methods)
• support 62 languages (30 for the web version)
• format ISO 639-1

Extra

• Playground - Try the library
• Getting Started
• API
• CLI
• TinyLD Web
• Supported Language
• Algorithm
• Developer

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Getting Started

Install

yarn add tinyld # or npm install --save tinyld

API

import { detect, detectAll } from 'tinyld'

// Detect
detect('これは日本語です.') // ja
detect('and this is english.') // en

// DetectAll
detectAll('ceci est un text en francais.')
// [ { lang: 'fr', accuracy: 0.5238 }, { lang: 'ro', accuracy: 0.3802 }, ... ]

More Information

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TinyLD CLI

tinyld This is the text that I want to check
# [ { lang: 'en', accuracy: 1 } ]

More Information

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Benchmark

Benchmark done on tatoeba dataset (~9M sentences) on 16 of the most common languages.

Library	Script	Properly Identified	Improperly identified	Not identified	Avg Execution Time	Disk Size
TinyLD	yarn bench:tinyld	96.1747%	2.6938%	1.1315%	0.1315ms.	778KB
TinyLD Web	yarn bench:tinyld-light	92.1169%	3.9536%	3.9295%	0.0616ms.	89KB
node-cld	yarn bench:cld	88.9148%	1.7489%	9.3363%	0.0612ms.	> 10MB
node-lingua	yarn bench:lingua	82.3157%	0.2158%	17.4685%	0.7085ms.	~100MB
franc	yarn bench:franc	68.7783%	26.3432%	4.8785%	0.1381ms.	267KB
franc-min	yarn bench:franc-min	65.5163%	23.5794%	10.9044%	0.0614ms.	119KB
languagedetect	yarn bench:languagedetect	61.6068%	12.295%	26.0982%	0.1585ms.	240KB

Remark

• For each category, top3 results are in Bold
• Language evaluated in this benchmark:
  • Asia: jpn, cmn, kor, hin
  • Europe: fra, spa, por, ita, nld, eng, deu, fin, rus
  • Middle east: , tur, heb, ara
• This kind of benchmark is not perfect and % can vary over time, but it gives a good idea of overall performances

Conclusion

Recommended

• For NodeJS: TinyLD or node-cld (fast and accurate)
• For Browser: TinyLD Light or franc-min (small, decent accuracy, franc is less accurate but support more languages)

Not recommended

• node-lingua is just too big and slow
• languagedetect is light but just not accurate enough, really focused on indo-european languages (support kazakh but not chinese, korean or japanese)