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.…
