{"about":{"site":"https://codewithpapers.app","non_affiliation":"Code with Papers and Syntology are not affiliated with, endorsed by, or sponsored by Papers with Code, Meta, or the pwc-archive mirror.","licence":"CC BY-SA 4.0","licence_url":"https://creativecommons.org/licenses/by-sa/4.0/legalcode","attribution":"https://codewithpapers.app/attribution","modified":"archive material modified by Syntology; see the attribution page"},"url":"/paper/limit-language-identification","title":"LIMIT: Language Identification, Misidentification, and Translation using Hierarchical Models in 350+ Languages","arxiv_id":"2305.14263","date":"2023-05-23","proceeding":null,"authors":["Milind Agarwal","Md Mahfuz ibn Alam","Antonios Anastasopoulos"],"abstract":"Knowing the language of an input text/audio is a necessary first step for using almost every NLP tool such as taggers, parsers, or translation systems. Language identification is a well-studied problem, sometimes even considered solved; in reality, due to lack of data and computational challenges, current systems cannot accurately identify most of the world's 7000 languages. To tackle this bottleneck, we first compile a corpus, MCS-350, of 50K multilingual and parallel children's stories in 350+ languages. MCS-350 can serve as a benchmark for language identification of short texts and for 1400+ new translation directions in low-resource Indian and African languages. Second, we propose a novel misprediction-resolution hierarchical model, LIMIt, for language identification that reduces error by 55% (from 0.71 to 0.32) on our compiled children's stories dataset and by 40% (from 0.23 to 0.14) on the FLORES-200 benchmark. Our method can expand language identification coverage into low-resource languages by relying solely on systemic misprediction patterns, bypassing the need to retrain large models from scratch.","url_abs":"https://arxiv.org/abs/2305.14263v2","url_pdf":"https://arxiv.org/pdf/2305.14263v2.pdf","source":{"archive":"pwc-archive (Hugging Face), CC BY-SA 4.0","snapshot":"2025-07-28","licence_url":"https://creativecommons.org/licenses/by-sa/4.0/legalcode","row_kind":"abstracts"},"code_links":[{"paper_slug":"limit-language-identification","repo_url":"https://github.com/magarw/limit","is_official":1,"mentioned_in_paper":1,"mentioned_in_github":0,"framework":"none","reach":null}],"tasks":[{"task_slug":"language-identification","task_name":"Language Identification"},{"task_slug":"translation","task_name":"Translation"}],"methods":[],"datasets_introduced":[],"methods_introduced":[],"results":[],"syntology":{"atlas_url":"https://app.syntology.ai/?focus=2305.14263","mcp":null,"developers":"https://syntology.ai/developers"},"arxiv_metadata":null,"syntology_extracted_results":null}