English

findsylls: A Language-Agnostic Toolkit for Syllable-Level Speech Tokenization and Embedding

Computation and Language 2026-03-30 v1 Artificial Intelligence

Abstract

Syllable-level units offer compact and linguistically meaningful representations for spoken language modeling and unsupervised word discovery, but research on syllabification remains fragmented across disparate implementations, datasets, and evaluation protocols. We introduce findsylls, a modular, language-agnostic toolkit that unifies classical syllable detectors and end-to-end syllabifiers under a common interface for syllable segmentation, embedding extraction, and multi-granular evaluation. The toolkit implements and standardizes widely used methods (e.g., Sylber, VG-HuBERT) and allows their components to be recombined, enabling controlled comparisons of representations, algorithms, and token rates. We demonstrate findsylls on English and Spanish corpora and on new hand-annotated data from Kono, an underdocumented Central Mande language, illustrating how a single framework can support reproducible syllable-level experiments across both high-resource and under-resourced settings.

Keywords

Cite

@article{arxiv.2603.26292,
  title  = {findsylls: A Language-Agnostic Toolkit for Syllable-Level Speech Tokenization and Embedding},
  author = {Héctor Javier Vázquez Martínez},
  journal= {arXiv preprint arXiv:2603.26292},
  year   = {2026}
}

Comments

4 pages + 2 for references, disclosures & acknowledgements; currently under review

R2 v1 2026-07-01T11:40:34.265Z