Abstract. This paper discusses the usage of the short-term energy contour of
speech smoothed by a fuzzy-based method to automatically segment it into
syllabic units. Two new additional procedures, local normalization and
postprocessing, are proposed to adapt to the Indonesian language. Testing to 220
Indonesian utterances showed that the local normalization significantly improved
the performance of the fuzzy-based smoothing. In the postprocessing procedure,
splitting and assimilation work in different ways. The splitting of missed short
syllables sharply reduced deletion, but slightly increased insertion. On the other
hand, the assimilation of a single consonant segment into an expected previous
or next segment slightly reduced insertion, but increased deletion. The use of
splitting gave a higher accuracy than the assimilation and combined splittingassimilation
procedures, since in many cases the assimilation keeps the
unexpected insertions and overmerges the expected segments.