Donald Knuth gives a very compact algorithm in the TeXbook (or else in the source for TeX itself) for determining hyphenation points while line-breaking during justification of text. It is from an MA thesis written by one of his students, as I recall. I once used his method in a text formatting program I wrote, but the algorithm itself is quite opaque in the form it has in the TeX source.
Knuth also has a good discussion in the TeXbook of what one wants in such an algorithm -- it has to avoid inaccuracies, because human readers will pick up on bad hyphenations quite readily. He mentions the classic case of "record", which as a verb should be re-cord, but as a noun should be rec-ord. Correspondingly, theories of English syllabification will tell you that a single medial C is pushed out of the following syllable when the preceding vowel is stressed and the following vowel is unstressed.
For the case of print formatting, in the case of "record", you want the algorithm to tell you not to attempt hyphenation, unless of course you have a transcription with stresses (or syllabification) marked.
Unless we have some information about how mistakes in syllabification are to be detected (for print formatting there are hyphenation dictionaries), I don't see how to really answer your question.