METHOD AND APPARATUS FOR AUTOMATIC LANGUAGE DETERMINATION OF EUROPEAN SCRIPT DOCUMENTS

An automatic language-determining apparatus automatically determines the particular European language of the text image of a document when the gross-script-type is known to be, or is determined to be, an European script-type. A word token generating means generates word tokens from the text image. A feature determining means determines the frequency of appearance of word tokens of the text portion which correspond to predetermined word tokens. A language determining means converts the determined frequency of appearance rates to a point in a new coordinate space, then determines which predetermined region of the new coordinate space the point is closes to, to determine the language of the text portion.