Syllabification Algorithm based on Syllable Rules Matching for Malay Language

In this paper, we present a new syllabification algorithm for Malay language. Syllabification is the process to extract or divide syllable from words. Syllabification process is language dependent where each language can have its own set of syllable structure. Syllabication is an important component in speech synthesizer, speech recognition and transliteration system. Syllabification algorithms have been proposed in many languages including English, Spanish, Myanmar, Singhala, Chinese and ect. Unfortunately, there are not many information regarding evaluation of syllabification scheme for Malay. In this paper, we propose an efficient algorithm based on syllable rules matching. In order to evaluate the algorithm, a prototype has been developed to measure the accuracy of syllabification. We evaluate our method using Bernama, Kamus Dewan and Overlap data collection. The syllable rules matching achieved 60.7% accuracy on BERNAMA collection, 77.4% on Kamus Dewan Collection and 71.6% on Overlap collection. Key-words: Syllabification, Text-to-Speech, Syllable Matching, Speech Synthesizer, Elicitation