• ETRI Journal
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• v.42 no.5
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• pp.761-772
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• 2020

This paper presents an automatic proficiency assessment method for a non-native Korean read utterance using bidirectional long short-term memory (BLSTM)-based acoustic models (AMs) and speech data augmentation techniques. Specifically, the proposed method considers two scenarios, with and without prompted text. The proposed method with the prompted text performs (a) a speech feature extraction step, (b) a forced-alignment step using a native AM and non-native AM, and (c) a linear regression-based proficiency scoring step for the five proficiency scores. Meanwhile, the proposed method without the prompted text additionally performs Korean speech recognition and a subword un-segmentation for the missing text. The experimental results indicate that the proposed method with prompted text improves the performance for all scores when compared to a method employing conventional AMs. In addition, the proposed method without the prompted text has a fluency score performance comparable to that of the method with prompted text.

• Phonetics and Speech Sciences
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• v.8 no.2
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• pp.31-39
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• 2016

In emergency dispatching at 119 Command & Dispatch Center, some inconsistencies between the 'standard emergency aid system' and 'dispatch protocol,' which are both mandatory to follow, cause inefficiency in the dispatcher's performance. If an emergency dispatch system uses automatic speech recognition (ASR) to process the dispatcher's protocol speech during the case registration, it instantly extracts and provides the required information specified in the 'standard emergency aid system,' making the rescue command more efficient. For this purpose, we have developed a Korean large vocabulary continuous speech recognition system for 400,000 words to be used for the emergency dispatch system. The 400,000 words include vocabulary from news, SNS, blogs and emergency rescue domains. Acoustic model is constructed by using 1,300 hours of telephone call (8 kHz) speech, whereas language model is constructed by using 13 GB text corpus. From the transcribed corpus of 6,600 real telephone calls, call logs with emergency rescue command class and identified major symptom are extracted in connection with the rescue activity log and National Emergency Department Information System (NEDIS). ASR is applied to emergency dispatcher's repetition utterances about the patient information. Based on the Levenshtein distance between the ASR result and the template information, the emergency patient information is extracted. Experimental results show that 9.15% Word Error Rate of the speech recognition performance and 95.8% of emergency response detection performance are obtained for the emergency dispatch system.

• MALSORI
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• no.49
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• pp.95-105
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• 2004

An automatic pronunciation correction system provides learners with correction guidelines for each mispronunciation. For this purpose we develope a speech recognizer which automatically classifies pronunciation errors when Koreans speak a foreign language. In order to develope the methods for automatic assessment of pronunciation quality, we propose a language model based score as a machine score in the speech recognizer. Experimental results show that the language model based score had higher correlation with human scores than that obtained using the conventional log-likelihood based score.

• MALSORI
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• no.49
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• pp.123-134
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• 2004

An automatic pronunciation correction system provides learners with correction guidelines for each mispronunciation. In this paper we propose an HMM based speech recognizer which automatically classifies pronunciation errors when Koreans speak Japanese. We also propose two pronunciation networks for automatic detection of mispronunciation. In this paper, we evaluated performances of the networks by computing the correlation between the human ratings and the machine scores obtained from the speech recognizer.

• Journal of Internet Computing and Services
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• v.22 no.6
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• pp.33-40
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• 2021

Automatic Speech Recognition(ASR) is a technology that analyzes human speech sound into speech signals and then automatically converts them into character strings that can be understandable by human. Speech recognition technology has evolved from the basic level of recognizing a single word to the advanced level of recognizing sentences consisting of multiple words. In real-time voice conversation, the high recognition rate improves the convenience of natural information delivery and expands the scope of voice-based applications. On the other hand, with the active application of speech recognition technology, concerns about related cyber attacks and threats are also increasing. According to the existing studies, researches on the technology development itself, such as the design of the Automatic Speaker Verification(ASV) technique and improvement of accuracy, are being actively conducted. However, there are not many analysis studies of attacks and threats in depth and variety. In this study, we propose a cyber attack model that bypasses voice authentication by simply manipulating voice frequency and voice speed for AI voice recognition service equipped with automated identification technology and analyze cyber threats by conducting extensive experiments on the automated identification system of commercial smartphones. Through this, we intend to inform the seriousness of the related cyber threats and raise interests in research on effective countermeasures.

• Proceedings of the KSPS conference
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• 2003.05a
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• pp.32-35
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• 2003

This paper describes our recent work for developing a baseline platform for Korean spoken dialog recognition. In our work, We have collected about 65 hour speech corpus with auditory transcriptions. Linguistic information on various levels such as mophology, syntax, semantics, and discourse is attached to the speech database by using automatic or semi-automatic tools for tagging linguistic information.

• Phonetics and Speech Sciences
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• v.15 no.3
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• pp.83-88
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• 2023

This study investigates the fine-tuning of large-scale Automatic Speech Recognition (ASR) models, specifically OpenAI's Whisper model, for domain-specific applications using the KsponSpeech dataset. The primary research questions address the effectiveness of targeted lexical item emphasis during fine-tuning, its impact on domain-specific performance, and whether the fine-tuned model can maintain generalization capabilities across different languages and environments. Experiments were conducted using two fine-tuning datasets: Set A, a small subset emphasizing specific lexical items, and Set B, consisting of the entire KsponSpeech dataset. Results showed that fine-tuning with targeted lexical items increased recognition accuracy and improved domain-specific performance, with generalization capabilities maintained when fine-tuned with a smaller dataset. For noisier environments, a trade-off between specificity and generalization capabilities was observed. This study highlights the potential of fine-tuning using minimal domain-specific data to achieve satisfactory results, emphasizing the importance of balancing specialization and generalization for ASR models. Future research could explore different fine-tuning strategies and novel technologies such as prompting to further enhance large-scale ASR models' domain-specific performance.

• Proceedings of the IEEK Conference
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• 2003.11b
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• pp.195-198
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• 2003

The accuracy of automatic speech recognition system depends on the presence of background noise and speaker variability such as sex, intonation of speech, and speaking rate. Specially, the speaking rate of both inter-speaker and intra-speaker is a serious cause of mis-recognition. In this paper, we propose the compensation method of the speaking rate by the ratio of each vowel's length in a phrase. First the number of feature vectors in a phrase is estimated by the information of speaking rate. Second, the estimated number of feature vectors is assigned to each syllable of the phrase according to the ratio of its vowel length. Finally, the process of feature vector extraction is operated by the number that assigned to each syllable in the phrase. As a result the accuracy of automatic speech recognition was improved using the proposed compensation method of the speaking rate.

• The Journal of the Acoustical Society of Korea
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• v.38 no.5
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• pp.601-606
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• 2019

This paper is a study on speech recognition in the Korean using grapheme unit (Cho-sumg [onset], Jung-sung [nucleus], Jong-sung [coda]). Here we make ASR (Automatic speech recognition) system without G2P (Grapheme to Phoneme) process and show that Deep learning based ASR systems can learn Korean pronunciation rules without G2P process. The proposed model is shown to reduce the word error rate in the presence of sufficient training data.

• Speech Sciences
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• v.11 no.2
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• pp.181-192
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• 2004

This paper presents an efficient speech interactive agent rendering smooth car navigation and Telematics services, by employing embedded automatic speech recognition (ASR), distributed speech recognition (DSR) and text-to-speech (ITS) modules, all while enabling safe driving. A speech interactive agent is essentially a conversational tool providing command and control functions to drivers such' as enabling navigation task, audio/video manipulation, and E-commerce services through natural voice/response interactions between user and interface. While the benefits of automatic speech recognition and speech synthesizer have become well known, involved hardware resources are often limited and internal communication protocols are complex to achieve real time responses. As a result, performance degradation always exists in the embedded H/W system. To implement the speech interactive agent to accommodate the demands of user commands in real time, we propose to optimize the hardware dependent architectural codes for speed-up. In particular, we propose to provide a composite solution through memory reconfiguration and efficient arithmetic operation conversion, as well as invoking an effective out-of-vocabulary rejection algorithm, all made suitable for system operation under limited resources.