impresso-project/language-identifier is a multilingual language identification model fine-tuned for use on historical newspaper content. It supports German (de), French (fr), Italian (it), English (en), and Luxembourgish (lb) — the core languages of the Impresso Project, which focuses on analyzing historical media across national and linguistic borders.

This model has been adapted for short, OCR-noisy and fragmentary inputs typical of historical digitized texts.

Model Details

This model is a supervised floret model, trained with the following parameters:

{'bucket': 200000,
 'dimension': 40,
 'hash_function': 'N/A',
 'loss': 'softmax',
 'maxn': 4,
 'minn': 1,
 'model_type': 'supervised',
 'vocab_size': 3}

On the impresso language identification challenge test set it achieves the following performance:

      de   en    fr   it  la   lb  nl
de  2854    0    79    3   0   38   0
en     0  156     1    0   0    0   0
fr    14   11  1515    1   7    9   0
it     0    0     0  136   0    0   0
la     0    0     0    0   0    0   0
lb     6    1    20    0   0  775   1
nl     0    0     0    0   0    0   0

Detailed Classification Report:

              precision    recall  f1-score   support

          de       0.99      0.96      0.98      2974
          en       0.93      0.99      0.96       157
          fr       0.94      0.97      0.96      1557
          it       0.97      1.00      0.99       136
          la       0.00      0.00      0.00         0
          lb       0.94      0.97      0.95       803
          nl       0.00      0.00      0.00         0

    accuracy                           0.97      5627
   macro avg       0.68      0.70      0.69      5627
weighted avg       0.97      0.97      0.97      5627

Model Description

Developed by: University of Zurich (UZH) from the Impresso team. The project is an interdisciplinary project focused on historical media analysis across languages, time, and modalities. Funded by the Swiss National Science Foundation (CRSII5_173719, CRSII5_213585) and the Luxembourg National Research Fund (grant No. 17498891).
Model type: Language identification using a transformer-based classification architecture
Languages: French, German, English, Italian, Luxembourgish
License: AGPL-3.0
Finetuned from: Custom model trained on historical newspaper data from the Impresso corpus

How to Use

python

from transformers import pipeline

MODEL_NAME = "impresso-project/language-identifier"

lang_pipeline = pipeline(
    "langident",
    model=MODEL_NAME,
    trust_remote_code=True,
    device="cpu",
)

text = """En l'an 1348, au plus fort des ravages de la peste noire à travers
l'Europe, le Royaume de France se trouvait à la fois au bord du désespoir et
face à une opportunité."""

langs = lang_pipeline(text)
print(langs)

Output Format

The output is a single dictionary with the predicted language and confidence score:

python

{
  "language": "fr",
  "score": 1.0
}

Use Cases

Preprocessing for OCR and NLP tasks on historical corpora
Document and segment-level language tagging
Filtering and sorting multilingual newspaper archives

Limitations

Works best on sentence- or paragraph-length texts
May struggle with code-switching or OCR-degraded text that mixes languages
Primarily optimized for Impresso-like sources (19th–20th century newspapers)

Installation

pip install transformers floret

Contact

Website: https://impresso-project.ch

Impresso Logo

impresso-project/language-identifier

Model Card for impresso-project/language-identifier

Overview