Detect Language of Transliterated Texts

Informal transliteration from other languages to English is prevalent in social media threads, instant messaging, and discussion forums. Without identifying the language of such transliterated text, users who do not speak that language cannot understand its content using translation tools. We propose a Language Identification (LID) system, with an approach for feature extraction, which can detect the language of transliterated texts reasonably well even with limited training data and computational resources. We tokenize the words into phonetic syllables and use a simple Long Short-term Memory (LSTM) network architecture to detect the language of transliterated texts. With intensive experiments, we show that the tokenization of transliterated words as phonetic syllables effectively represents their causal sound patterns. Phonetic syllable tokenization, therefore, makes it easier for even simpler model architectures to learn the characteristic patterns to identify any language.