A Syllabification Algorithm for Spanish

This paper presents an algorithm for dividing Spanish words into syllables. This algorithm is based on grammatical rules which were translated into a simple algorithm, easy to implement and with low computational cost. Experimental results in an evaluation text corpus show an overall error rate of 1.6%. Most of the error is attributed to words with diphthongs and to confusion in the use of prefixes where grammatical rules are not always absolute. Syllabification is an essential component of many speech and language processing systems, and this algorithm might be very useful to researchers working with the Spanish language.