Patent ID: 7359851
Filing Date: 2008-04-15
Classification: G06F

Abstract:
1. A method of determining the language of a textual passage, the method comprising the steps of: (a) parsing said textual passage into plural n-grams; (b) comparing each of said plural n-grams with a plurality of databases, wherein each of said databases comprises multiple n-grams associated with a specific language; (c) determining an initial weight for each of said plural n-grams, per language, by calculating the frequency with which each of said plural n-grams appears in each of said databases and dividing said frequency by the total number of the multiple n-grams in said respective database; (d) determining the number of said databases within which each of said plural n-grams appear; (e) altering said initial weight for each of said plural n-grams by multiplying said initial weight with the inverse of said number of databases within which each of said plural n-grams appear to produce an altered weight for each of said plural n-grams; (f) multiplying, for each of the plural n-grams, a number of times that n-gram appears in the textual passage by the altered weight of that n-gram from step (e) to produce a product for each n-gram, per language, and summing those products to produce a language passage weight for each language for the textual passage; (g) determining, based upon a comparison of the language passage weights from step (f) the most likely language or languages for the textual passage.