Comparison of rule-based and data-driven approaches for syllabification of simple syllable languages and the effect of orthography

摘要

Syllabication algorithms have been developed for many languages because of the important role that syllables play in language processing. However, efforts continue to find better methods. In this study, we take a second look at the performance of two major approaches to syllabication to help determine their relationship to the structure of languages and their orthographies. We applied syllabification to two languages, Igbo and Yoruba, with simple syllable structure. The paper shows that the rule-based approach is not inferior to the data-driven approach as earlier reported for syllables with more complex structures. In addition, the results from the two languages showed that syllabication performance is affected to a certain extent by the orthography of the language in question independent of the structure of the language.