A Roadmap for Universal Syllabic Segmentation

• Authors: SOJKA Ondřej; SOJKA Petr; MÁCA Jakub
• Year of publication: 2023
• Type: Article in Periodical
• Magazine / Source: Zpravodaj CSTUG
• MU Faculty or unit: Faculty of Informatics
• Web: DOI
• Doi: http://dx.doi.org/10.5300/2023-3-4/125
• Keywords: syllabification; hyphenation; universal syllabic patterns preparation

Description

Space- and time-effective segmentation (word hyphenation) of natural languages remains at the core of every document rendering system, be it TeX, web browser, or mobile operating system. In most languages, segmentation mimicking syllabic pronunciation is a pragmatic preference today.

As language switching is often not marked in rendered texts, the typesetting engine needs universal syllabic segmentation. In this article, we show the feasibility of this idea by offering a prototype solution to two main problems:
A) Using Patgen to generate patterns for several languages at once; and
B) lack of Unicode support in tools like Patgen or TeX (patterns in UTF-16 encoding) is missing.

For A), we have applied it to generating universal syllabic patterns from wordlists of nine syllabic, as opposed to etymology-based, languages (namely, Czech, Slovak, Georgian, Greek, Polish, Russian, Turkish, Turkmen, and Ukrainian).
For B), we have created a version of Patgen that uses the Judy array data structure and compared its effectiveness with the trie implementation.

With the data from these nine languages, we show that:
A) developing universal, up-to-date, high-coverage, and highly generalized universal syllabic segmentation patterns is possible, with a high impact on virtually all typesetting engines, including web page renderers; and
B) bringing wide character support into the hyphenation part of the TeX suite of programs is possible by using Judy arrays.

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