Automatic rule-based syllabication for Romanian

The syllable is a speech synthesis unit that is successfully used in high quality speech synthesis systems. In support of a syllable based speech synthesis system, we consider necessary the realization of an algorithm for automatic syllabication. In this paper we present an algorithm for automatic syllabication. The algorithm starts by making the phonetic transcription of the word using a previously developed method which employs a set of phonetic rules represented through a XML scheme. Then it applies a set of rules for syllabication. The system obtained a 10.5% word error rate for syllabication and 4.79% word error rate for phonetic transcription using rules.