How can I detect a user's input language using Ruby without using an online service?

Question

I\'m looking for a library or technique to detect the input language of blocks of text provided by users. Online lookups (like Google translate) won\'t work for this task as

Answer 1

Here are two more n-gram-based gems you might want to try. They work offline.

• https://github.com/echen/unsupervised-language-identification, optimized for separating english and other languages (has a live demo)
• https://github.com/feedbackmine/language_detector, less specialized, will detect more languages. Some languages may need some extra training — I found it to be not precise enough for German text.

Answer 2

A quick demo of WhatLanguage in Ruby:

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=lNqZ2cqOReo&list=UUJ_3fstMOH-g4yBxtvgAWkw&index=0&feature=plcp

Answer 3

For anyone interested, I've found http://rubygems.org/gems/kenwaln-whatlanguage, which is performing excellently.

Answer 4

I'm using CLD which I really like, succinct and easy to use. Give it a try.