Do your social profiles reveal what languages you speak? Language inference from social media profiles

Abstract

In the multilingual World Wide Web, it is critical for Web applications, such as multilingual search engines and targeted international advertisements, to know what languages the user understands. However, online users are often unwilling to make the effort to explicitly provide this information. Additionally, language identification techniques struggle when a user does not use all the languages they know to directly interact with the applications. This work proposes a method of inferring the language(s) online users comprehend by analyzing their social profiles. It is mainly based on the intuition that a user’s experiences could imply what languages they know. This is nontrivial, however, as social profiles are usually incomplete, and the languages that are regionally related or similar in vocabulary may share common features; this makes the signals that help to infer language scarce and noisy. This work proposes a language and social relation-based factor graph model to address this problem. To overcome these challenges, it explores external resources to bring in more evidential signals, and exploits the dependency relations between languages as well as social relations between profiles in modeling the problem. Experiments in this work are conducted on a large-scale dataset. The results demonstrate the success of our proposed approach in language inference and show that the proposed framework outperforms several alternative methods.