Language Detection API

Recently I came across a requirement to identify the language in the given text. First I started with the language detection API. Let's have a look into the details of it:
Language detection API is a language detection web service. It accepts text and produces result with detected language code and score. It currently detects 160 languages.

Available plans

Plan name	No: of requests/day	Data usage/day	Price
Free	5,000 requests	1 MB	Free
Basic	100,000 requests	20 MB	$5/month
Plus	1M requests	200 MB	$15/month
Premium	10M requests	2 GB	$40/month

API Key

To use Language detection API we need an API key which can be obtained from:

https://detectlanguage.com/users/sign_up

API Clients

Language detection web service provides API clients for the following programming languages:

• Ruby
• Java
• Python
• PHP
• C# (.NET)

JSON API Usage

1. Basic detection

Submit HTTP request to http://ws.detectlanguage.com/0.2/detect with the following parameters:

q - Your text, mandatory

key - your API key, mandatory

Eg: http://ws.detectlanguage.com/0.2/detect?q=buenos+dias+se%C3%B1or&key=demo

Response is:

{"data":{"detections":[{"language":"es","isReliable":true,"confidence":10.24}]}}

Interpretation of results:

Confidence value depends on how much text we pass and how well it is identified. The more text we pass, the higher confidence value will be. It is not a range, it can be higher than 100.

Reliability is not directly linked to the confidence. In case our text contains words in different languages then isReliable: true would identify that first detected language is significantly more probable than the second one. When only one language is detected isReliable: false would mean that confidence is very low.

Language defines the language code identified. API returns 'xxx' code for unknown language.

2. Batch Requests

It is possible to detect language of several texts using one query. This saves network bandwidth and increases performance. Batch request detections are counted as separate requests, i.e. if 3 texts were passed they will be counted as 3 separate requests.

Eg:

http://ws.detectlanguage.com/0.2/detect?q[]=buenos+dias+señor&q[]=hello+world&key=demo

Response:

{"data":{"detections":[[{"language":"es","isReliable":true,"confidence":10.24}],[{"language":"en","isReliable":true,"confidence":11.94}]]}}

3. Accessing plan details

User request and data counters can be accessed at http://ws.detectlanguage.com/0.2/user/status

Eg:

http://ws.detectlanguage.com/0.2/user/status?key=yourKey

Response:

{"date":"2015-05-19","requests":0,"bytes":0,"plan":"FREE","plan_expires":null,"daily_requests_limit":5000,"daily_bytes_limit":1048576,"status":"ACTIVE"}

4. Language Support

List of all supported languages are available at:

http://ws.detectlanguage.com/0.2/languages

5. Secure Mode(SSL)

Texts submitted to the API are used by language detection engine only. Texts are not stored or used in any other way. If you are passing sensitive information to the API, you can use HTTPS protocol to ensure secure network transfer.Source: https://detectlanguage.com/

Sample Code:

import java.io.BufferedReader;

import java.io.IOException;

import java.io.InputStreamReader;

import java.net.HttpURLConnection;

import java.net.URL;

import java.net.URLConnection;

public class LanguageDetection {

public void detectLanguage(String message) throws IOException{

        String text;

String head="http://ws.detectlanguage.com/0.2/detect?q=";

String apiKey="&key=your API key";

text=message.replaceAll("\\s+","%20");

try

     {

URL url = new URL(head+text+apiKey); 

        URLConnection urlConnection = url.openConnection();

        HttpURLConnection connection = null;

        connection = (HttpURLConnection) urlConnection;

        BufferedReader in = new BufferedReader(

        new InputStreamReader(connection.getInputStream()));

        String urlString = "";

        String current;

        while((current = in.readLine()) != null)

        {

           urlString += current;

        }

        System.out.println(urlString);

     }catch(IOException e)

     {

        e.printStackTrace();

     }

}

public static void main(String args[]) throws IOException{

LanguageDetection langDetect=new LanguageDetection();

langDetect.detectLanguage("suprabhatham");

}

}

Result:

{"data":{"detections":[{"language":"sa","isReliable":true,"confidence":15.75}]}}

The language was identified as Sanskrit.

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