Automatic Language Identification

Automatic Language Identification (LID) is the process of automatically identifying the language of spoken utterance or written material. LID has received much attention due to its application to major areas of research and long-aspired dreams in computational sciences, namely Machine Translation (MT), Speech Recognition (SR) and Data Mining (DM). A considerable increase in the amount of and access to data provided not only by experts but also by users all over the Internet has resulted into both the development of different approaches in the area of LID – so as to generate more efficient systems – as well as major challenges that are still in the eye of the storm of this field. Despite the fact that the current approaches have accomplished considerable success, future research concerning some issues remains on the table. The aim of this paper shall not be to describe the historic background of this field of studies, but rather to provide an overview of the current state of LID systems, as well as to classify the approaches developed to accomplish them. LID systems have advanced and are continuously evolving. Some of the issues that need special attention and improvement are semantics, the identification of various dialects and varieties of a language, identification of spelling errors, data retrieval, multilingual documents, MT and speech-to-speech translation. Methods applied to date have been good from a technical point of view, but not from a semantic one.