Data preparation

• Time-aligned phonemes

Expected result

• Time-aligned syllables

Syllabification: my approach

• A rule-based system to cluster phonemes into syllables
• Rules available for:
  • French
  • Italian
  • Polish
• This phoneme-to-syllable segmentation system is based on 2 main principles:
  1. a syllable contains a vowel, and only one;
  2. a pause is a syllable boundary.

Syllabification: my approach (continued)

• Phonemes are grouped into classes
• Classes for both French and Italian:
  • V - Vowels,
  • G - Glides,
  • L - Liquids,
  • O - Occlusives,
  • F - Fricatives,
  • N - Nasals.

Syllabification: my approach (continued)

• Fix rules to find the boundaries between two vowels
  • general rules with V and C
    • VCV => V.CV
    • VCCV => VC.CV
  • exception rules based on the classes
    • VLGV => V.LGV
    • VOGV => V.OGV
  • other rules based on the phonemes themselves

Syllabification: resources

• A file with:
  • the list of phonemes and the corresponding class
  • the list of all rules
• Current languages:
  • French: 10 exception rules; 6 phoneme-based rules
  • Italian: 11 exception rules; 1 phoneme-based rule
  • Polish: 50 exception rules; 337 phoneme-based rules
  • Catalan: in the "to-do" list of November 2016
  • English however... is not so easy!

Syllabification of French

Brigitte Bigi, Christine Meunier, Irina Nesterenko and Roxane Bertrand (2010). 
Automatic detection of syllable boundaries in spontaneous speech.
Language Resource and Evaluation Conference, pages 3285-3292, La Valetta, Malte.

Syllabification of Italian

Brigitte Bigi and Caterina Petrone (2014).
A generic tool for the automatic syllabification of Italian.
In Proceedings of the First Italian Conference on Computational Linguistics CLiC-it 2014 and 
of the Fourth International Workshop EVALITA 2014, pp. 73–77, Pisa, Italy.

Syllabification of Polish

Brigitte Bigi and Katarzyna Klessa (2015).
Automatic Syllabification of Polish.
In 7th Language and Technology Conference: Human Language Technologies as a Challenge for 
Computer Science and Linguistics, pp. 262–266, Poznan, Poland.

Summary

• Phonemes and words segmentation
• Syllables segmentation
• Repetitions detection
• Conclusion