Multilingual syllabification using weighted finite-state transducers.

Abstract

Just as vowels with consonants are the matter of syllables, so also syllables are the matter for the construction of nouns and verbs, and of the elements which are made out of them. Antony the Rhetorician of Tagrit ( c. 445?) Knowledge of Rhetoric, Book Five, Canon One This paper describes an approach to syllabification that has been incorporated into the English and German text-to-speech systems at Bell Labs. Implemented as a weighted finite-state transducer, the syllabifier is easily integrated – via mathematical composition – into the finite-state based text analysis component of the textto-speech system. The weights are based on frequencies of onset, nucleus and coda types obtained from training data. While the training data is language-dependent, the formal approach is multilingual. 1.