Languages

You are to write an interactive program that, given a sequence of Wikipedia excerpts (see example below), guesses the language of each, in turn. After each guess, your program is given the correct answer, so that it may learn to make better guesses the longer it plays.

Each language is represented by a number L between 0 and 55. Each excerpt has exactly 100 symbols, represented as an array E of 100 integers between 1 and 65,535. These integers between 1 and 65,535 have been assigned arbitrarily, and do not correspond to any standard encoding.

You are to implement the procedure excerpt(E) where E is an array of 100 numbers representing a Wikipedia excerpt as described above. Your implementation must call language(L) once, where L is its guess of the language of the Wikipedia edition from which E was extracted. The grading server implements language(L), which scores your guess and returns the correct language. That is, the guess was correct if language(L) = L.

The grading server calls excerpt(E) 10,000 times, once for each excerpt in its input file. Your implementation's accuracy is the fraction of excerpts for which excerpt(E) guessed the correct language.

You may use any method you wish to solve this problem. Rocchio's method is an approach that will yield accuracy of approximately 0.4. Rocchio's method computes the similarity of E to each language L seen so far, and chooses the language that is most similar. Similarity is defined as the total number of distinct symbols in E that appear anywhere amongst the previous excerpts from language L.

Note that the input data have been downloaded from real Wikipedia articles, and that there may be a few malformed characters or fragments of text. This is to be expected, and forms part of the task.