Add traditional vs simplified chinese support

[asg0451]

Hi! I'm considering using Lingua in a project. It compares favourably to CLD2 and Whatlang on our dataset (social media posts), but one of our requirements is that we need to distinguish between traditional and simplified chinese, which Lingua does not support.

Are there any plans to support this? Our requirement for Chinese support probably won't be crucial until later in the year, so if support is in development that would go a long way.

Thanks!

[pemistahl]

Hello Miles, thanks for your request.

Back then, when I added support for Chinese, I did not find proper training corpora that consisted only of traditional or simplified Chinese, respectively. That's why Lingua cannot differentiate between them yet. Do you know of a good source for training material perhaps? I can start a search myself again as well. If successful, adding support for traditional and simplified Chinese won't be difficult anymore.

[asg0451]

Thanks for the reply!

No, I don't know of any specific training corpora -- but it's my understanding that traditional vs simplified chinese typically have different character sets, so it may be possible to distinguish them without a ML model. In fact, perhaps I could use such a thing...

Things such as: https://github.com/magiclen/opencc-rust and unicode properties (https://www.unicode.org/reports/tr38/#kTraditionalVariant)

[pemistahl]

OpenCC is supported on Linux only which makes it a non-feasible solution for my library. And don't forget that there could be foreign language material in Chinese texts. So I think we won't get around creating ML models. I will try to find some good training data again, perhaps I will be more lucky this time.

[asg0451]

Awesome! In the meantime, I'm using some heuristics based on lookup tables of variant-specific characters.