There are ways to figure out language with very short text. In fact, one can identify language changes in documents that contain text in multiple languages.
http://www.stanford.edu/class/ee380/Abstracts/090114.html That's not to say that Twitter uses such methods, just that it's possible to identify languages in tweet-size documents. On Oct 26, 6:19 am, Nicole Simon <nee...@gmail.com> wrote: > The language selection is useless, even with a limitation to English. > The problem is probably that normal methods of attributing language > are more or less based on longer text - and not text stripped down > to 140 chars or less. > > If you want to make detection f.e. in search, rather get all > results and apply common sense methods, like grep > special words which most likely are only used in your > language of choice. > > For real 'select your choice here' it is not going to work. > > At the current rate, this is rather hurting than helping. > I instruct users in my book to rather use search which > will limit itself, i.e. use German words if possible in search. > > Nicole > > -- > > My german twitter sitehttp://mit140zeichen.de-http://twitter.com/m140z > > Kontakt:http://twitter.com/NicoleSimonhttps://www.xing.com/profile/Nicole_Simon > > skype: nicole.simon / mailto:nicole.si...@mit140zeichen.de > phone: +49 451 899 75 03 / mobile: +49 179 499 7076