Romanized Berber and Romanized Arabic Automatic Language Identification Using Machine Learning

Abstract

The identification of the language of text/speech input is the first step to be able to properly do any language-dependent natural language processing. The task is called Automatic Language Identification (ALI). Being a well-studied field since early 1960's, various methods have been applied to many standard languages. The ALI standard methods require datasets for training and use character/word-based n-gram models. However, social media and new technologies have contributed to the rise of informal and minority languages on the Web. The state-of-the-art automatic language identifiers fail to properly identify many of them. Romanized Arabic (RA) and Romanized Berber (RB) are cases of these informal languages which are under-resourced. The goal of this paper is twofold: detect RA and RB, at a document level, as separate languages and distinguish between them as they coexist in North Africa. We consider the task as a classification problem and use supervised machine learning to solve it. For both languages, character-based 5-grams combined with additional lexicons score the best, F-score of 99.75\% and 97.77\% for RB and RA respectively.

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