ZHLID is a classification model specialized in fine-grained Chinese varieties. It adopts ModernBERT architecture and is trained with in-house dataset composed by Traditional Chinese and Simplified Chinese data.

Unlike general-purpose LID tools, ZHLID focuses on distinguishing between closely related Chinese varieties, including:

Traditional Chinese (繁體中文) – written in the traditional character set, used in formal and classical texts.
Simplified Chinese (簡體中文) – written in the simplified character set, designed for easier reading and writing.
Cantonese (粵語) – written form reflecting spoken Cantonese with unique vocabulary and grammar.
Classical Chinese (Traditional) (繁體文言文) – literary Chinese in traditional characters with concise, classical syntax.
Classical Chinese (Simplified) (簡體文言文) – literary Chinese in simplified characters, used in modern reprints and education.

This makes ZHLID useful for linguistic research, corpus analysis, preprocessing for NLP tasks, or any application requiring accurate recognition of Chinese textual forms.

The following table compares ZHLID with other popular LID tools supporting Chinese detection:

Identification	General Chinese	Traditional Chinese	Simplified Chinese	Classical Chinese	Cantonese
ZHLID (ours)	✅	✅	✅	✅	✅
langdetect	✅	✅	✅	❌	❌
GlotLID	✅	❌	❌	❌	✅
langid.py	✅	❌	❌	❌	❌
CLD3	✅	❌	❌	❌	❌
Lingua	✅	❌	❌	❌	❌

Installation

To use ZHLID model, install transformers with version higher than v4.48.0:

pip install -U transformers>=4.48.0

Optionally, you can install flash-attention to improve inference efficiency:

pip install flash-attn --no-build-isolation

Usage

With pipeline function in transformers:

python

from transformers import pipeline

pipe = pipeline("text-classification", model="MusubiAI/ZHLID")
text = "孔子\n大成至圣先师孔丘，字仲尼，子姓，孔氏，敬称孔子、孔夫子，生于鲁昌平乡陬邑。"

res = pipe(text)
print(res)
# [{'label': 'zhcn_classical', 'score': 0.9998414516448975}]

With AutoModelForSequenceClassification:

python

import torch
import torch.nn as nn
from transformers import AutoModelForSequenceClassification, AutoTokenizer

model_id = "MusubiAI/ZHLID"
model = AutoModelForSequenceClassification.from_pretrained(model_id)
tokenizer = AutoTokenizer.from_pretrained(model_id)
id2label = model.config.id2label

text = "孔子\n大成至圣先师孔丘，字仲尼，子姓，孔氏，敬称孔子、孔夫子，生于鲁昌平乡陬邑。"
inputs = tokenizer(text, return_tensors="pt")
outputs = model(**inputs)

with torch.no_grad():
    logits = model(**inputs)["logits"]

scores = nn.functional.softmax(logits, dim=-1)
pred_score, pred_index = torch.max(scores, dim=-1)
pred_score = pred_score.item()
pred_index = pred_index.item()
label = id2label[pred_index]
prediction = {"label": label, "confidence_score": pred_score}
print(prediction)
# {'label': 'zhcn_classical', 'confidence_score': 0.99983811378479}

Using vllm is also available:

python

from vllm import LLM
import torch
import torch.nn.functional as F


llm = LLM(model="MusubiAI/ZHLID", task="classify")


text = "孔子\n大成至圣先师孔丘，字仲尼，子姓，孔氏，敬称孔子、孔夫子，生于鲁昌平乡陬邑。"

output = llm.classify(text)[0]
probs = output.outputs.probs
probabilities = torch.tensor(output.outputs.probs)

# Get the top predicted class
top_idx = torch.argmax(probabilities).item()
top_prob = probabilities[top_idx].item()

print(f"Confidence: {top_prob:.4f}")

id2label = {
    "0": "yue",
    "1": "zhcn_classical",
    "2": "zhtw_classical",
    "3": "zhcn",
    "4": "zhtw"
}

label = id2label[str(top_idx)]
print(label)

Evaluation

We compare our top-1 accuracy result with GlotLID and langdetect. Note that since GlotLID only provides a general "cmn_Hani" label for Chinese, its performance on Traditional and Simplified Chinese is measured by whether it outputs this label for both categories.

Top-1 accuracy	Traditional Chinese	Simplified Chinese	Classical Chinese (Traditional)	Classical Chinese (Simplified)	Cantonese
ZHLID (ours)	1.0	1.0	0.9	1.0	0.96
GlotLID	0.98	0.98	-	-	0.9
langdetect	0.3	0.9	-	-	-

License

ZHLID model is released under the Apache 2.0 license.

Citation

If you use ZHLID in your research, please cite this repository:

bibtex

@misc{zhlid2025 ,
  title  = {ZHLID: Fine-grained Chinese Language Identification Package},
  author = {Lung-Chuan Chen},
  year   = {2025},
  howpublished = {\url{https://github.com/Musubi-ai/ZHLID}}
}