Rules for Orthographic Word Parsing of the Philippines' Cebuano-Visayan Language Using Context-Free Grammars

Abstract

Syllabication is essential in the preprocessing stage of speech systems. In the context of the Philippines' Cebuano-Visayan language's syllabication rules, the existing rules do not include hyphenated words although the hyphen defines the syllable boundary in a word. Hence, this study created grammar rules for hyphenated words which include sequences of a hyphen between vowel-consonant, consonant-consonant, vowel-vowel, and consonant-vowel. The test was done for the enhanced grammar rules for Cebuano-Visayan syllabication with 1,465 representative hyphenated and non-hyphenated words of varying lengths. The result further implies that the syllabication analysis for hyphenated words showed that hyphens improve the naturalness and intelligibility in the utterance of the words, thereby enhancing the understanding and comprehension of the Cebuano-Visayan discourse.