4. The method of claim 1 wherein obtaining n-gram data for the target document includes converting character data for the target document to a character coding scheme for which an n-gram based language model for each candidate language M is available.
1. A method of identifying one or more languages for a document, the languages being selected from a set of candidate languages, the method comprising: for each language (M) in the set of candidate languages, defining a set of non overlapping languages (N(M)), the set N(M) consisting of one or more languages (L), wherein each language L in the set N(M) does not overlap with the language M; obtaining n-gram data for a target document; for each language M in the set of candidate languages, using the n-gram data to determine a final score S F (M) based on relative probabilities of a first hypothesis that the target document is entirely in the language M and a second hypothesis that one portion of the target document is in the language M while another portion of the target document is in a language L selected from the set N(M); identifying, by a processor, one or more of the candidate languages as being languages of the document based on the final scores S F (M) for different languages M; and storing, in a computer readable storage device, information indicating the one or more languages of the document.