On european Portuguese automatic syllabification

Abstract

This paper presents three methods for dividing European Portuguese (EP) words into syllables, two of them handling graphemes as input, the other processing phone sequences. All three try to incorporate linguistic knowledge about EP syllable structure, but in different degrees. Experimental results showed, for the best method, percentage of correctly recognized syllable boundaries above 99.5 %, and comparable word accuracy. The much simpler finite state transducer based method also achieved a good performance, making it suitable for applications more interested in speed and memory footprint. Being syllabification an essential component of many speech and language processing systems, proposed methods can be useful to researchers working with the EP language.