How Should We Model the Probability of a Language?

Rasul Dent, Pedro Ortiz Suarez, Thibault Clérice, Benoît Sagot
2/9/2026
cs.CL

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Abstract

Of the over 7,000 languages spoken in the world, commercial language identification (LID) systems only reliably identify a few hundred in written form. Research-grade systems extend this coverage under certain circumstances, but for most languages coverage remains patchy or nonexistent. This position paper argues that this situation is largely self-imposed. In particular, it arises from a persistent framing of LID as decontextualized text classification, which obscures the central role of prior probability estimation and is reinforced by institutional incentives that favor global, fixed-prior models. We argue that improving coverage for tail languages requires rethinking LID as a routing problem and developing principled ways to incorporate environmental cues that make languages locally plausible.

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@article{dent2026should,
  title  = {How Should We Model the Probability of a Language?},
  author = {Rasul Dent and Pedro Ortiz Suarez and Thibault Clérice and Benoît Sagot},
  year   = {2026},
  eprint = {2602.08951},
  archivePrefix = {arXiv},
  url    = {http://arxiv.org/abs/2602.08951v1}
}

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