sylbreak4all: Regular Expressions for Syllable Breaking of Nine Major Ethnic Languages of Myanmar

Abstract

Unlike many other western languages, the Myanmar language uses a syllabic writing system and no space between words. Syllable segmentation is the necessary preprocess for natural language processing (NLP) tasks such as grapheme-to-phoneme (g2p) conversion, machine translation, romanization, and so on. In this study, sylbreak4all, a syllable segmentation tool, was developed for nine major ethnic languages of Myanmar, and they are Burmese, Shan, Pa’o, Pwo Kayin, S’gaw Kayin, Rakhine, Myeik, Dawei, and Mon by using regular expression (RE) patterns.