Silabificador

Silabificador splits a Portuguese word into syllables. It uses hand-crafted rules based on Portuguese phonotactics. It has no runtime dependencies and loads no model.

Features

• Syllabification for Portuguese, derived from the licit onset inventory and the diphthong/hiatus rules, not from a table of special cases.
• Stress, primary and secondary, read from the orthography that encodes it.
• Syllable structure, not just strings: onset, glide, nucleus, coda.
• The output always reconstructs the input. Hyphens, spaces, and apostrophes stay in place and are never dropped.
• No dependencies.

Installation

pip install git+https://github.com/TigreGotico/silabificador

Usage

from silabificador import syllabify

syllabify("computador")     # ['com', 'pu', 'ta', 'dor']
syllabify("guarda-chuva")   # ['guar', 'da-', 'chu', 'va']

Use analyze for the constituents, or stressed_index for the stress:

from silabificador import analyze, stressed_index

for s in analyze("transportar"):
    print(s.onset, s.nucleus, s.coda, s.stressed)
# tr a ns False
# p  o r  False
# t  a r  True      -> trans.por.TAR

stressed_index("sílaba")   # 0   SÍ.la.ba

A compound keeps a stress on every element. The last element takes the primary stress:

[str(s) for s in analyze("guarda-chuva") if s.secondary]   # ['guar']
[str(s) for s in analyze("guarda-chuva") if s.stressed]    # ['chu']

See docs/api.md for the full API surface and docs/advanced.md for the rules and the known limits.

Accuracy

Silabificador is measured against the Portuguese Unified Pronunciation Lexicon. This lexicon carries syllabifications from two independent authorities: Infopédia (Porto Editora) and the Portal da Língua Portuguesa.

The gold set is the set of words the two sources independently agree on (35,181 words), after discarding any entry whose syllables do not reconstruct its headword. Every word is scored. There is no sampling and no cap.

All 116,959 scoreable words reconstruct exactly.

Where the two authorities disagree (135 words, on morpheme boundaries and on etymological hiatus), the tool scores against neither answer, because there is no fact of the matter to be right about.

Stress is measured against a gold the engine cannot see: the lexicon's IPA transcriptions, which mark stress with ˈ. Nothing in the engine reads IPA.

The self-check gives a reason to trust the gold: on a simple word, a written accent is the stress, by definition of the spelling rules, so the IPA-derived answer must agree with it, and it does.

To reproduce the accuracy numbers and see every remaining failure bucketed by cause, run:

pip install -e ".[benchmark]"
python -m benchmark.report

Related projects

Silabificador is part of the TigreGotico Portuguese phonetics toolchain, alongside:

• orthography2ipa
• tugaphone
• bifonia
• g2p_barranquenho

License

MIT License