A gift for language

摘要

Your PC has a hidden flair for recognising foreign languages. WinZip, the software routinely used to compress PC files, can help you figure out the language a document is written in, say Italian scientists. It could even be used to guess a document's author. The technique, which can identify the language of a segment of text as little as 20 characters long, will be described in a future edition of the journal Physical Review Letters. Vittorio Loreto, a physicist at Rome's La Sapienza University, and his colleagues Dario Benedetto and Emanuele Caglioti have applied for a patent on their idea.