Sylli: Automatic Phonological Syllabification for Italian

We will present a complete syllabifier for Italian (Sylli), that is based on phonological principles, flexible and easy to adapt for other uses, alphabets and languages. Crucial concepts regarding syllabification principles in modern phonological theory will be discussed (§1.1); specific issues concerning Italian syllabification will then be summarised (§1.2) and an overview of the available automatic syllabification models will be provided (§1.3). We will then move on to describe the program structure, the syllabification algorithm and two particular issues concerning syllabification in Italian (§2). Finally, we will illustrate the results of a manual syllabification test carried out by linguists to verify the accuracy of the algorithm (§3).