Language detection

Each time a post is created, the body content is analyzed to determine which language(s) it contains. The result is stored in JSON format in the field body_language in the table Comments As a post can contain multiple languages, the result is an array.

Each item in the array contains the following values:

Language code
Confidence score
Is reliable - true/false

If the language cannot be determined (ex: post containing pictures only), the array will be left empty

The result is something like this:

A post with several languages will have his body_language field set to something like

[{"language":"es","isReliable":true,"confidence":8.22},
 {"language":"en","isReliable":false,"confidence":5.12}]

The confidence value is related to how much text the post contains. The more text analyzed, the better the language analysis, the higher the confidence value. Confidence is not a ratio and can be higher than 100.

If the post contains words in different languages, isReliable will be set to true to identify the most probable language, even if its confidence value is lower.

If there is only one language and isReliable is set to false, this indicates confidence is too low.

Be aware that language detector works using probabilities and sometimes it is not accurate with very short texts. The same happens when different languages used in the post have similar words.

The language detector can also be tricked when the content of a post contains lots of "technical noise" like pictures, source code, edit tags, ...

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Last updated 3 years ago