• The Journal of the Acoustical Society of Korea
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• v.24 no.1E
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• pp.28-33
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• 2005

This study was designed to suggest an assessment tool for analyzing the characteristics of Korean phonetic contrast intelligibility among dysarthric individuals. The intelligibility deficit factors of phonetic contrast in Korean dysarthric patients were analyzed through stepwise regression analysis. The 19 acoustic-phonetic contrasts proposed by Kent et al. (1999) have been claimed to be useful for clinical assessment and research on dysarthria. However, the test cannot be directly applied to Korean patients due to linguistic differences between English and Korean. Thus, it is necessary to devise a Korean word intelligibility test that reflects the distinct characteristics of the Korean language. To identify the speech error characteristics of a Korean dysarthric group, a Korean word list was audio-recorded by 3 spastic, 4 flaccid, and 5 mixed type of dysarthric patients. The word list consisted of monosyllabic consonant-vowel-consonant (CVC) real word pairs. Stimulus words included 41 phonemic contrast pairs and six triplets. The results showed that the percentage of errors in final position contrast was higher than in any other position. Unlike the results of previous studies, the initial-position contrasts were crucial in predicting the overall intelligibility among Korean patients.

• Speech Sciences
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• v.10 no.2
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• pp.303-318
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• 2003

This paper attempts to investigate the tonal implementations of English stress clash, arguing that a preceding stress shifts leftward when two lexical stresses conflict across word boundaries or that H* and L* pitch accents are alternatively manifested on the stressed syllables, establishing intonational peak and valley contours. We claim that the H*/L* alternation might be a tonal strategy to avoid stress clash, and that pitch could be solely manipulated to display a rhythmic effect with maintaining lexical stress. In the experiment, we examined two-word combinations whose boundaries involve stress clash, and divided them into two categories. One has the preceding words involving a heavy syllable ahead of stress to guarantee the place for a shifting stress and the other, a light syllable, in which case stress shift is completely prevented. We analyzed the distribution of pitch accents in the word combinations, focusing on the pitch configurations in the cases where stress should not be shifted. Results show that approximately 50% of the stimuli show stress shift in the heavy syllable combinations of the preceding words; the preceding stress is moved leftward within the word. The other 50% and the light syllable combinations show various pitch accents patterns; H* and L* alternation, deaccentuation of either stressed syllable, or L-insertion between two H* pitch accents, etc. We interpret this as a rhythmic effect of tone to avoid stress clash and suggest that a true stress clash would be confined into cases without H*/L* contours.

• Korean Journal of English Language and Linguistics
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• v.3 no.4
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• pp.611-635
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• 2003

The main purpose of this study is to find out what teaching method is more effective than others through experiments for college students. Therefore, this study aims to review various effective methods of vocabulary teaching. According to the results of the experiments, the methods of teaching vocabulary through the process of word formation and meaningful words led to the high scores at the posttest regardless of the scores gained by the individual subjects at the pretest. However, the method of teaching vocabulary through context showed that the improved scores at the posttest generally reflected the individual differences of the scores at the pretest. That is, in the latter, it is recognizable that the subjects who achieved the high scores at the pretest did very well at the posttest as well. In conclusion, judging from the mean rate of improvement, the method of teaching vocabulary through word formation seems to be more effective than that of teaching vocabulary through meaningful words and context.

• Speech Sciences
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• v.10 no.4
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• pp.73-79
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• 2003

There are more than five systems for transcribing English vowels. Because of this diversity, teachers of English and students are confronted with not a little problems with the English vowel symbols used in the English-Korean dictionaries, English text books, books for Phonetics and Phonology. This study was designed to suggest criterions for the phonemic transcription of English vowels on the basis of phonetic properties of the vowels and a system of English vowel transcription based on the criterions in order to minimize the problems with inter-system differences. A speaker (phonetician) of RP English uttered a series of isolated minimal pairs containing the vowels in question. The suggested vowel symbols are as follows: (1) Simple vowels: /i:/ in beat, /I/ bit, /$\varepsilon$/ bet, /${\ae}$ bat, /a:/ father, /Dlla/ bod, /c:/ bawd, /$\upsilon$ put, /u:/ boot /$\Lambda$/ but, and /e/ about /$\varepsilon:ll3:r$/ bird. (2) Diphthongs: /aI/ in bite, /a$\upsilon$/ bout, /cI/ boy, /3$\upsilon$llo$\upsilon$/ boat, /eI/ bait, /eelleer/ air, /uelluer/ poor, /iellier/ beer. Where two symbols are shown corresponding to the vowel in a single word, the first is appropriate for most speakers of British English and the second for most speakers of American English.

• The Journal of the Korea Contents Association
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• v.13 no.11
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• pp.551-561
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• 2013

The purpose of this study was firstly, to evaluate the contents of vocabulary game applications for young children's language learning. and secondly, to examine whether there is any differences between Korean and English word games in terms of the evaluation score. For this purpose, the word game applications in smart phone and tablet PC were analyzed, which included 30 Korean word games and another 30 English ones. The criteria to evaluate the contents were developed based on Children's Software Evaluation Instrument developed by CTR, the multimedia evaluation standard by Hee Sook Park, Young Joo Lee, and mobile contents evaluation standard by Soo Ui Choi. As a result, the educational value got the highest score whereas the design characteristics area got the lowest score in the whole evaluation analysis. And English word game applications mostly got higher score than Korean versions. The result of this study would suggest the way to evaluate educational game applications in use and to contribute to developing educational game contents aimed at young children's language learning.

• Phonetics and Speech Sciences
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• v.7 no.3
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• pp.45-53
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• 2015

The current study investigated CVCC syllables in spontaneous American English speech to find out whether such syllables are produced as phonological units with a string of segments, showing a hierarchical structure. Transcribed data from the Buckeye Speech Corpus was used for the analysis in this study. The result of the current study showed that the constituents within a CVCC syllable as a phonological unit may have phonetic variations (namely, the final coda may undergo deletion). First, voiceless alveolar stops were the most frequently deleted when they occurred as the second final coda consonants of a CVCC syllable; this deletion may be an intermediate process on the way from the abstract form CVCC (with the rime VCC) to the actual pronunciation CVC (with the rime VC), a production strategy employed by some individual speakers. Second, in the internal structure of the rime, the proportion of deletion of the final coda consonant depended on the frequency of the word rather than on the position of postvocalic consonants on the sonority hierarchy. Finally, the segment following the consonant cluster proved to have an effect on the reduction of that cluster; more precisely, the following contrast was observed between obstruents and non-obstruents, reflecting the effect of sonority: when the segment following the consonant cluster was an obstruent, the proportion of deletion of the final coda consonant was increased. Among these results, the effect of word frequency played a critical role for promoting the deletion of the second coda consonant for clusters in CVCC syllables in spontaneous speech. The current study implies that the structure of syllables as phonological units can vary depending on individual speakers' lexical representation.

• KSII Transactions on Internet and Information Systems (TIIS)
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• v.15 no.6
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• pp.2049-2068
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• 2021

AI combined with NLP techniques has promoted the use of Virtual Assistants and have made people rely on them for many diverse uses. Conversational Agents are the most promising technique that assists computer users through their operation. An important challenge in developing Conversational Agents globally is transferring the groundbreaking expertise obtained in English to other languages. AI is making it possible to transfer this learning. There is a dire need to develop systems that understand secular languages. One such difficult language is Hindi, which is the fourth most spoken language in the world. Semantic similarity is an important part of Natural Language Processing, which involves applications such as ontology learning and information extraction, for developing conversational agents. Most of the research is concentrated on English and other European languages. This paper presents a Corpus-based word semantic similarity measure for Hindi. An experiment involving the translation of the English benchmark dataset to Hindi is performed, investigating the incorporation of the corpus, with human and machine similarity ratings. A significant correlation to the human intuition and the algorithm ratings has been calculated for analyzing the accuracy of the proposed similarity measures. The method can be adapted in various applications of word semantic similarity or module for any other language.

• Proceedings of the KSPS conference
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• 2002.11a
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• pp.97-100
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• 2002

The purpose of this paper is to investigate the unit of neighbor of Korean words. In English, a word's orthographic neighborhood is defined as the set of words that can be created by changing one letter of the word while preserving letter positions. For example, the words like pike, pole, and tile are all orthographic neighbors of the word 'pile'. In this study, 2 experiments were performed. In these experiments, 4 conditions of prime were included: primes sharing first letter of first syllable(1), first syllable(2), first syllable and the first letter of second syllable with target(3) and with no formal similarity with target(4). In Exp.1, RT was shortest in condition 3. In Exp.2, condition 2 had the shortest RT. We came to the conclusion that in Korean, a word's neighbor is words that share at least one syllable with the word.

• Language and Information
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• v.9 no.2
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• pp.23-48
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• 2005

This study aims to discuss the word sense distinction of Korean middle verbs for restructuring KorLexVerb 1.0. Despite the duality of its meaning and syntactic structure, the word senses of middle verb are not clearly distinguished in current dictionaries. The underspecification causes very often mismatches that a same Korean word sense is used for two different English verb senses. A close examination on the syntactic and semantic properties of middle verb shows us that the word sense distinction and the reconstruction of hierarchical structure are indispensable. Finally, by doing this fine grained word sense distinction, we propose an alternative way of classification and description of the verb polysemy for KorLexVerb 1.0 as well as for dictionary-like language resources.

• Journal of the Korea Society of Computer and Information
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• v.23 no.11
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• pp.31-41
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• 2018

Text classification has been studied for a long time in the Natural Language Processing field. In this paper, we propose an article- and paragraph-level genre classification system using Word2Vec-based LSTM, GRU, and CNN models for large-scale English corpora. Both article- and paragraph-level classification performed best in accuracy with LSTM, which was followed by GRU and CNN in accuracy performance. Thus, it is to be confirmed that in evaluating the classification performance of LSTM, GRU, and CNN, the word sequential information for articles is better than the word feature extraction for paragraphs when the pre-trained Word2Vec-based word embeddings are used in both deep learning-based article- and paragraph-level classification tasks.