Language Detection for chunks of text

Overview

Add a new chrome.i18n.detectLanguage that enables CLD language detection for a chunk of user-supplied text.

Use cases

This API would be useful for extensions that want to translate parts of a page that are in a different language than the page itself. This is also useful in implementing an extension that translates user-supplied text (in a gadget, for example) into a language of the user’s choice, without needing to rely on an external server for language detection of the text. The existing chrome.tabs.detectLanguage API only provides language detection on a page-level granularity.

Could this API be part of the web platform?

No, this is intended to fill in a functionality gap with an existing chrome extension API, and not to introduce new web standards.

Do you expect this API to be fairly stable?

The set of languages that can be detected by the CLD may change over time, which affects the results of this function in a similar way as chrome.tabs.detectLanguage.

What UI does this API expose?

None.

How could this API be abused?

There’s nothing obvious that could be abused here.

How would you implement your desired features if this API didn't exist?

The only way to detect the language of a chunk of text from a page right now would be to transmit the text to a third party server and wait for a reply. This is not desirable as it introduces privacy concerns about sending text scraped from parts of a page to a server before a user explicitly requests they be translated.

Are you willing and able to develop and maintain this API?

Yes.

Draft API spec

Methods

detectLanguage

chrome.i18n.detectLanguage(string text, function callback)

Detects the primary language of a supplied chunk of text. Language detection is more reliable for larger chunks of text (preferably 100 characters or more), but may be able to make a determination with small chunks for languages that use unique characters, such as Arabic or Hebrew.

Parameters

text ( string )

The text to analyze.

callback ( function )

The callback parameter should specify a function that looks like this:

function(array of DetectedLanguage languages) {...};

result ( LanguageDetectionResult )

Will contain up to three languages that were detected in text.

Types

DetectedLanguage

( object )

language ( string )

An ISO language code such as en or fr. For a complete list of languages that could be returned here, see kLanguageInfoTable. The 2nd to 4th columns will be checked and the first non-NULL value will be returned except for Simplified Chinese for which zh-CN will be returned.

confidence ( integer )

A value between 0 and 100, inclusive, that indicates Chrome’s percentage confidence that the supplied text is in this language. High values indicate high confidence.

LanguageDetectionResult

( Object)

reliable ( boolean )

True if language detection was considered reliable. This is the case when a single language emerges with a confidence value that is significantly higher than the next most likely language.

languages ( array of DetectedLanguage )

The possible languages that were detected for the supplied text, if any.

Open questions

Is it useful to return the raw confidence numbers for each language? These may change with each new implementation of the CLD.