• Journal of the Korean Institute of Telematics and Electronics
• /
• v.27 no.10
• /
• pp.138-145
• /
• 1990

This paper present a rule-based speech synthesis method for improving the naturalness of synthetic speech and using the small data base based on demisyllable units. A 12-pole Linear Prediction Coding method is used to analyses demisyllable speech signals. A syllable and vowel concatenation rule is developed to improve the naturalness and intelligibility of the synthetic speech. in addiion, phonological structure transform rule using neural net and prosody rules are applied to the synthetic speech.

• The Journal of the Acoustical Society of Korea
• /
• v.15 no.4
• /
• pp.98-104
• /
• 1996

This paper propose the alteraton rule to compensate a formant trasition of several connected vowels for improving an unnatural synthesized continuous speech which is concatenated by each demisyllable without coarticulated formant transition for use in dmisyllable based synthesis by rule. To fullfill each formant transition part, the database of 42 stationary vowels which are segmented from the stable part of each vowels is appended to the one of Korean demisyllables, and the resonance circuit used in formant synthesis is employed to change the formant frequency of speech signals. To evaluate the synthesied speech by this rule, we carried out the alteration rule for connected vowels of the synthesized speech based on demisyllable, and compare spectrogram and MOS tested scores with the original and the demisyllable based synthesized speech without this rule. The result shows that this proposed rule can synthesize the more natural speech.

• The Journal of the Acoustical Society of Korea
• /
• v.22 no.3
• /
• pp.175-181
• /
• 2003

Because a word of Korean digits is a syllable and deeply coarticulatied in connected digits, some recognition models based on demisyllables have been proposed by researchers. However, they could not show an excellent recognition results yet. This paper proposes a recognition model based on extended and context-dependent demisyllables, such as a tri-demisyllable like a tri-phone, for the Korean 4-connected digits recognition. For experiments, we use a toolkit of HTK 3.0 for building this model of continuous HMMs using training Korean connected digits from SiTEC database and for recognizing unknown ones. The results show that the recognition rate is 92% and this model has an ability to improve the recognition performance of Korean connected digits.

• Proceedings of the Acoustical Society of Korea Conference
• /
• 1992.06a
• /
• pp.81-84
• /
• 1992

포만트형 합성기에 사용될 반음절 데이터 베이스의 구성과 필요한 파라미터의 추출 과정에 대하여 논한다. 포만트 합성기는 많은 구동 파라미터를 필요로 하기 때문에 저장 장소를 절약하기 위해서 적절한 합성단위의 선택과 합성단위의 효율적인 표현이 필요하다. 본 연구에서는 포만트 합성기에 있어서 합성음의 음질에 큰 영향을 미치는 포만트궤적의 추출과 데이터베이스의 구성에 대하여 기술한다.

• The Journal of the Acoustical Society of Korea
• /
• v.17 no.2
• /
• pp.3-10
• /
• 1998

본 논문에서는 음소단위 PSOLA 한국어 합성을 LSP line의 조절과 자모음 분석을 통해서 실시하였다. 음성합성에서 많이 사용하는 triphone, diphone, demisyllable등과 같은 합성단위들은 자연스러운 합성음을 위해 다양한 음운환경에서 수집된다. 그러나, 이런 방법 은 많은 시간과 메모리가 요구된다. 본 논문에서는 합성단위로서 자음17개, 모음 16개로 총 33개의 음소를 이용하였다. 자음은 후위모음/이/인 CV에서 segment되고, 모음은 단음절의 단모음과 이중모음을 1인의 화자로부터 합성데이터를 수집하였다. 또한, 10명의 화자가 발성 한 CV에서 각 모음에 따라 변하는 자음의 주파수를 분석하였고, CV+VC 또는 CV+CV에서 각 자음에 따라 변하는 모음의 포먼트변화를 분석하였다. 분석결과를 토대로 모음은 LSP line을 조절해서 PSOLA합성을 하고, 자음은 합성하려는 모음과 결합하였다. 그 결과 6개의 합성단어에 대한 청취율은 65%를 보였다.

• Journal of the Korean Institute of Telematics and Electronics B
• /
• v.28B no.10
• /
• pp.755-760
• /
• 1991

In this paper, we propose a new formant locus overlapping method which can effectively enhance a naturalness of synthetic speech produced by ddemisyllable based Korean text-to-speech system. At first, Korean demisyllables are divided into several number of segments which have linear formant transition characteristics. Then, database, which is composed of start point and length of each formant segments, is provided. When we synthesize speech with these demisyllable database, we concatenate each formant locus by using a proposed overlapping method which can closely simulate haman articulation mechanism. We have implemented a Korean text-to-speech system by using this method and proved that the formant loci of synthetic speech are similar to those of the natural speech. Finally, we could illustrate that the resulting spectrograms of proposed method are more similar to natural speech than those of conventional method.

• Journal of Korea Multimedia Society
• /
• v.9 no.1
• /
• pp.23-32
• /
• 2006

This paper describes the optimization of a language model and an acoustic model to improve speech recognition using Korean unit digits. Since the model is composed of a finite state network (FSN) with a disyllable, recognition errors of the language model were reduced by analyzing the grammatical features of Korean unit digits. Acoustic models utilize a demisyllable pair to decrease recognition errors caused by inaccurate division of a phone or monosyllable due to short pronunciation time and articulation. We have used the K-means clustering algorithm with the transformed successive state splitting in the feature level for the efficient modelling of feature of the recognition unit. As a result of experiments, 10.5% recognition rate is raised in the case of the proposed language model. The demi-syllable fair with an acoustic model increased 12.5% recognition rate and 1.5% recognition rate is improved in transformed successive state splitting.

• The Journal of Korean Institute of Communications and Information Sciences
• /
• v.23 no.6
• /
• pp.1443-1453
• /
• 1998

This paper presents the speech synthesis engine that converts the character strings kept in a computer memory into the synthesized speech sounds with enhancing the intelligibility and the naturalness by adapting the waveform processing method. The speech engine using demisyllable speech segments receives command streams for pitch modification, duration and energy control. The command based engine isolates the high level processing of text normalization, letter-to-sound and the lexical analysis and the low level processing of signal filtering and pitch processing. The TTS(Text-to-Speech) system implemented by using the speech synthesis engine has three independent object modules of the Text-Normalizer, the Commander and the said Speech Synthesis Engine those of which are easily replaced by other compatible modules. The architecture separating the high level and the low level processing has the advantage of the expandibility and the portability because of the mix-and-match nature.

• The Journal of the Acoustical Society of Korea
• /
• v.20 no.3
• /
• pp.24-33
• /
• 2001

this paper describes a baseline for an implementation of a corpus-based Korean TTS system. The conventional TTS systems using small-sized speech still generate machine-like synthetic speech. To overcome this problem we introduce the corpus-based TTS system which enables to generate natural synthetic speech without prosodic modifications. The corpus should be composed of a natural prosody of source speech and multiple instances of synthesis units. To make a phone level synthesis unit, we train a speech recognizer with the target speech, and then perform an automatic phoneme segmentation. We also detect the fine pitch period using Laryngo graph signals, which is used for prosodic feature extraction. For break strength allocation, 4 levels of break indices are decided as pause length and also attached to phones to reflect prosodic variations in phrase boundaries. To predict the break strength on texts, we utilize the statistical information of POS (Part-of-Speech) sequences. The best triphone sequences are selected by Viterbi search considering the minimization of accumulative Euclidean distance of concatenating distortion. To get high quality synthesis speech applicable to commercial purpose, we introduce a domain specific database. By adding domain specific database to general domain database, we can greatly improve the quality of synthetic speech on specific domain. From the subjective evaluation, the new Korean corpus-based TTS system shows better naturalness than the conventional demisyllable-based one.