June 16th, 2009
Lately, What Language Is This?, the web-based language identification tool I’m running, has been getting many hits from Tamil-language sources, probably as a result of being covered in two seemingly popular blogs, techintamil.blogspot.com, and tamilnenjam.com. As another blogger pointed out,
Also this service is very good at identifying indic languages (where as many other services fail to understand).
Well, thanks. And yes, I have been making sure that the languages of the Indian subcontinent and its surrounding areas are thoroughly supported for identification.
But two notable languages have been missing, and I finally got around to adding them. Namely the two Dravidian languages Malayalam (not to be confused with Malay, to which it is unrelated) and Kannada (not to be confused with Canada, to which it is unrelated).
Together with the already supported Tamil and Telugu, this means that all four literary Dravidian languages are supported now! I hope this will be of use to many, and I’d like to thank the Dravidian-speaking bloggers for their support in the form of writing about the site.
Tags: improvements, language, language analyzer, projects
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February 1st, 2009
I got around to implementing a feature I’ve been planning for What Language Is This? today: feedback. Not the comments – that’s been there from the start – but a way of sending immediate feedback on specific results. So that if you disagree with the result, or you know the correct language but it’s not yet supported, just click on “send feedback” that appears with each result, and a simple form pops up that where you can indicate what the problem with that result is.
The entered text can also be sent with the feedback, allowing me to gather more sample texts to use as material for the statistical analysis used as a basis when identifying the language, and for testing (there’s an automatic test feature built in to What Language Is This?, just run selftest() from a JavaScript console on the page and it’ll test all supported languages to check for regressions – very handy when updating the database, since it’s easy to accidentally break some of the fine tuning).
Anyway, I think it’ll be useful, and I hope everyone will use it a lot since it’ll help me improve the site. I’m already getting a lot of useful and encouraging comments so it’s really fun to keep on developing it. For the next update I’ll probably add more languages.
Tags: improvements, language analyzer, projects, testing, web apps
Posted in projects | 2 Comments »
