• Journal of KIISE:Software and Applications
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• v.37 no.11
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• pp.837-844
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• 2010

Prediction of the prosodic phrase boundary is one of the most important natural language processing tasks. We propose, for the natural prediction of the Korean prosodic phrase boundary, a statistical approach incorporating efficient learning features. These new features reflect the factors that affect generation of the prosodic phrase boundary better than existing learning features. Notably, moreover, such learning features, extracted according to the hand-crafted prosodic phrase boundary prediction rule, impart higher accuracy. We developed a statistical model for Korean prosodic phrase boundaries based on the proposed new features. The results were 86.63% accuracy for three levels (major break, minor break, no break) and 81.14% accuracy for six levels (major break with falling tone/rising tone, minor break with falling tone/rising tone/middle tone, no break).

• The Journal of the Acoustical Society of Korea
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• v.18 no.4E
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• pp.26-30
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• 1999

This paper introduces a prosodic phrasing method in Korean to improve the naturalness of speech synthesis, especially in text-to-speech conversion. In prosodic phrasing, it is necessary to understand the structure of a sentence through a language processing procedure, such as part-of-speech (POS) tagging and parsing, since syntactic structure correlates better with the prosodic structure of speech than with other factors. In this paper, the prosodic phrasing procedure is treated from two perspectives: dependency parsing and prosodic phrasing using dependency relations. This is appropriate for Ural-Altaic, since a prosodic boundary in speech usually concurs with a governor of dependency relation. From experimental results, using the proposed method achieved 12% improvement in prosody boundary prediction accuracy with a speech corpus consisting 300 sentences uttered by 3 speakers.

• MALSORI
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• no.35_36
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• pp.145-155
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• 1998

This study intended to determine the most appropriate POS(Part of Speech) sets for predicting prosodic boundary strength efficiently. We used 3-level POB bets which Kim(1997), one of the authors, has devised. Three POS sets differ from each other according to how much grammatical information they have: the first set has maximal syntactic and morphological information which possibly affects prosodic phrasing, and the third set has minimal one. We hand-labelled 150 sentences using each of three POS sets and conducted perception test. Based on the results of the test, stochastic language modeling method was used to predict prosodic boundary strength. The results showed that the use of each POS set led to not too much different efficiency in the prediction, but the second set was a little more efficient than the other two. As far as the complexity in stochastic language modeling is concerned, however, the third set may be also preferable.

• The Journal of the Acoustical Society of Korea
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• v.18 no.6
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• pp.84-88
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• 1999

The accurate estimation of segmental duration is crucial for natural-sounding text-to-speech synthesis. For predicting Korean segmental durations, conventional methods utilized phonemic context, part-of-speech context and locational information in prosodic phrase. In this paper, the tonal information of phonemes is employed for more accurate prediction. After defining two non-boundary tones and six boundary tones, we annotated the tonal label on each syllable of 400 sentences. To predict segmental duration using tonal information, we constructed neural networks with a real-valued output node predicting phonemic duration and trained them by backpropagation algorithm. Experimental results showed that the proposed features are effective for predicting Korean segmental durations, and we got 0.863 correlation coefficient of the observed durations and predicted ones.

• Proceedings of the Acoustical Society of Korea Conference
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• spring
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• pp.77-82
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• 2002

운율은 음성의 초분절적인 면에 연관하는 음성의 한 성으로서 통상적으로 화자는 음성을 달하는 과정에서 청자의 이해를 돕기 위해 운율을 사용하게 된다. 본 논문은 이러한 운율을 이루는 성분 중의 하나인 운율구의 위치 예측에 대한 성능을 향상시키는 것에 그 목적을 둔다. 한국어 운율 정보에 대한 표기 방법 중의 하나인 K-ToBI를 기반으로 하여, 운율구의 경계와 그에 대한 레벨을 Break Indices 정보로서 나타내었고, 통계학 분야에서 제안된 Support Vector Machine(SVM)을 이용하여 시스템의 예측률 향상을 꾀하였다. 기존의 방법에서 사용된 트리 기반 모델을 이용하여 한국어 운율에 가장 많은 영향을 끼치는 언어 정보들을 추출하였고 이를 실험에 적용하였다. 기존의 트리 모델과 SVM 모델에 대한 예측률을 비교한 결과, 경계 유무 정보 예측과 4단계의 레벨을 가지는 경계 정보의 예측에서 모두 본 방법이 보다 높은 예측률을 보여 주어 본 연구에서 제시한 접근법이 운율구의 경계 정보를 예측하는 데에 있어 더욱 효과적인 접근법임을 실험적으로 입증하였다.