How to Use Polyglot in Python for Language Detection, Sentiment & More

Learn how to use Polyglot in Python for language detection, sentiment analysis, tokenization, and more. Master multilingual NLP with this simple step-by-step guide.

Working with text in different languages is tough, especially when you don’t speak the language but that’s exactly what Polyglot helps with.

It’s a Python library built for natural language processing, and it makes working with multilingual text a lot easier than you’d think.

It can figure out what language a piece of text is in, split sentences into words, or even pick out names of people and places. All without much effort on your end.

I wouldn’t call myself a polyglot, although I do have a love for learning languages. Aside from english, I’d say I can speak decent Vietnamese and basic French.

While I plan to keep learning these languages, Polyglot can help with all the others.

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I’ve spent time with other NLP libraries like NLTK and SpaCy, and they’re both great, but Polyglot stood out because of how simple it is to move between languages. It’s not just built for English but also works across a huge range of languages.

That’s a big plus when you’re dealing with real-world data, because not everything you collect is going to be in English.

When I first tried it, I did run into a few bumps (getting all the extra pieces installed felt a little tricky), but once it was ready to go, it worked smoothly. With only a few lines of code, you can start analyzing text in over 160 languages, which is pretty wild when you think about it.

In this article, I’ll show you some of the things Polyglot can do, like detecting languages, splitting sentences into words, and pulling out useful details like names and places. What I like most is that you don’t need to know a ton about linguistics to use it. You can just throw in some text and watch it do the heavy lifting.

Polyglot might not be as famous as SpaCy or NLTK, but it’s a solid option if you need to handle multiple languages quickly. Whether you’re sorting through tweets, digging into customer reviews, or just curious about how computers break down human language, Polyglot makes the process easy and even fun to play around with.

To get started, all you need to do is install it:

pip3 install polyglot

Once that’s done, you’ll be ready to explore languages in Python with just a few lines of code.

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