A Rule-based Syllabification Algorithm with Stress Determination for Brazilian Portuguese Natural Language Processing

This paper presents some improvements on an existing set of linguistic rules that is capable of performing the syllabification of Brazilian Portuguese words. An algorithm was also implemented and based on this set, which improvements previously mentioned include new rules that depend on the stressed vowel to achieve the standard syllabification of some words that otherwise would be very difficult to do so, when just the graphemes themselves are considered for the process mentioned above. With the improvements applied to the original rule set, the new version of the algorithm achieved a better performance than the previous one (without the improvements) in performing the syllabification of four different kinds of diphthongs that exist in Brazilian Portuguese.