Automatic Language Identification and Content Separation from Indian Multilingual Documents Using Unicode Transformation Format

Abstract

In Natural Language Processing (NLP), language identification is the problem of determining which natural language(s) are used in written script. This paper presents a methodology for Language Identification from multilingual document written in Indian language(s). The main objective of this research is to automatically, quickly, and accurately recognize the language from the multilingual document written in Indian language(s) and then separate the content according to types of language, using Unicode Transformation Format (UTF). The proposed methodology is applicable for preprocessing step in document classification and a number of applications such as POS-Tagging, Information Retrieval, Search Engine Optimization, and Machine Translation for Indian languages. Sixteen different Indian languages have been used for empirical purpose. The corpus texts were collected randomly from web and 822 documents were prepared, comprising of 300 Portable Document Format (PDF) files and 522 text files. Each of 822 documents contained more than 800 words written in different and multiple Indian languages at the sentence level. The proposed methodology has been implemented using UTF-8 through free and open-source programming language Java Server Pages (JSP). The obtained results with an execution of 522 Text file documents yielded an accuracy of 99.98 %, whereas 300 PDF documents yielded an accuracy of 99.28 %. The accuracy of text files is more than PDF files by 0.70 %, due to corrupted texts appearing in PDF files.