• The Journal of Korea Institute of Information, Electronics, and Communication Technology
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• v.13 no.3
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• pp.197-205
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• 2020

Korean language has the characteristics that the pronunciation of phoneme units such as vowels and consonants are fixed and the pronunciation associated with a notation does not change, so that foreign learners can approach rather easily Korean language. However, when one pronounces words, phrases, or sentences, the pronunciation changes in a manner of a wide variation and complexity at the boundaries of syllables, and the association of notation and pronunciation does not hold any more. Consequently, it is very difficult for foreign learners to study Korean standard pronunciations. Despite these difficulties, it is believed that systematic analysis of pronunciation errors for Korean words is possible according to the advantageous observations that the relationship between Korean notations and pronunciations can be described as a set of firm rules without exceptions unlike other languages including English. In this paper, we propose a visualization framework which shows the differences between standard pronunciations and erratic ones as quantitative measures on the computer screen. Previous researches only show color representation and 3D graphics of speech properties, or an animated view of changing shapes of lips and mouth cavity. Moreover, the features used in the analysis are only point data such as the average of a speech range. In this study, we propose a method which can directly use the time-series data instead of using summary or distorted data. This was realized by using the deep learning-based technique which combines Self-organizing map, variational autoencoder model, and Markov model, and we achieved a superior performance enhancement compared to the method using the point-based data.

• The KIPS Transactions:PartB
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• v.10B no.2
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• pp.169-178
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• 2003

This study outlines two viewpoints the classification of phone likely unit (PLU) which is the foundation of korean large vocabulary speech recognition, and the effectiveness of Chiljongseong (7 Final Consonants) and Paljogseong (8 Final Consonants) of the korean language. The phone likely classifies the phoneme phonetically according to the location of and method of articulation, and about 50 phone-likely units are utilized in korean speech recognition. In this study auditory phonetical knowledge was applied to the classification of phone likely unit to present 45 phone likely unit. The vowels 'ㅔ, ㅐ'were classified as phone-likely of (ee) ; 'ㅒ, ㅖ' as [ye] ; and 'ㅚ, ㅙ, ㅞ' as [we]. Secondly, the Chiljongseong System of the draft for unified spelling system which is currently in use and the Paljongseonggajokyong of Korean script haerye were illustrated. The question on whether the phonetic value on 'ㄷ' and 'ㅅ' among the phonemes used in the final consonant of the korean fan guage is the same has been argued in the academic world for a long time. In this study, the transition stages of Korean consonants were investigated, and Ciljonseeng and Paljongseonggajokyong were utilized in speech recognition, and its effectiveness was verified. The experiment was divided into isolated word recognition and speech recognition, and in order to conduct the experiment PBW452 was used to test the isolated word recognition. The experiment was conducted on about 50 men and women - divided into 5 groups - and they vocalized 50 words each. As for the continuous speech recognition experiment to be utilized in the materialized stock exchange system, the sentence corpus of 71 stock exchange sentences and speech corpus vocalizing the sentences were collected and used 5 men and women each vocalized a sentence twice. As the result of the experiment, when the Paljongseonggajokyong was used as the consonant, the recognition performance elevated by an average of about 1.45% : and when phone likely unit with Paljongseonggajokyong and auditory phonetic applied simultaneously, was applied, the rate of recognition increased by an average of 1.5% to 2.02%. In the continuous speech recognition experiment, the recognition performance elevated by an average of about 1% to 2% than when the existing 49 or 56 phone likely units were utilized.

• The Journal of the Acoustical Society of Korea
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• v.41 no.3
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• pp.359-366
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• 2022

In this paper, we present the Korean menu-ordering Sentence Text-to-Speech (TTS) system using conformer-based FastSpeech2. Conformer is the convolution-augmented transformer, which was originally proposed in Speech Recognition. Combining two different structures, the Conformer extracts better local and global features. It comprises two half Feed Forward module at the front and the end, sandwiching the Multi-Head Self-Attention module and Convolution module. We introduce the Conformer in Korean TTS, as we know it works well in Korean Speech Recognition. For comparison between transformer-based TTS model and Conformer-based one, we train FastSpeech2 and Conformer-based FastSpeech2. We collected a phoneme-balanced data set and used this for training our models. This corpus comprises not only general conversation, but also menu-ordering conversation consisting mainly of loanwords. This data set is the solution to the current Korean TTS model's degradation in loanwords. As a result of generating a synthesized sound using ParallelWave Gan, the Conformer-based FastSpeech2 achieved superior performance of MOS 4.04. We confirm that the model performance improved when the same structure was changed from transformer to Conformer in the Korean TTS.

• The Journal of Korean Academy of Prosthodontics
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• v.32 no.1
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• pp.77-102
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• 1994

Many studies have been made on the masticatory and esthetic effects of prosthodontic treatments, but few on the restoration of pronunciation, especially in complete denture wearers. The purpose of this study is to provide a basis that could be of help to the complete denture wearers' speech adaptation by analyzing the influence of the palatal coverage upon the duration of consonants and vowels with the method of experimental phonetics. For this study, metal plates and resin plates were made for 3 male subjects in their twenties, who have good occlusion, and do not have speech and hearing disorders. Then 8 Korean consonants and 4 Korean vowels were selected, systemically considering phonetic variants such as the place and manner of articulation, lenis/fortis, mutual effect of each phoneme, etc. They were combined into meaningless tested words in the form of /VCV/, and were included in the carrier sentences. Each informant uttered the sentences 1) without the plate, 2) with the metal plate, 3) with the resin plate. The recorded data were analyzed through the waveform of sounds and spectrogram by using the program SoundEdit, Signalize, Statview 512+for the Macintosh computer. The duration of each segment was measured by searching for the boundaries between the preceding vowels and consonants, and between the consonants and the following vowels. The study led to the conclusion that. 1. With the palatal plate, the duration of all the tested words increased and the duration increased more with the resin plate than with the metal plate. 2. With the palatal plate, the duration of all the preceding vowels, consonants, and following vowels increased, but the temporal structure of the tested words was maintained. 3. As for the manner of articulation, fricative /s/(ㅅ) was greatly influenced by both kinds of palatal plates. 4. As for the place of articulation, alveolar sounds /d/(ㄷ), /n/(ㄴ) were greatly influnced by the kinds of palatal plates, and the velar sounds /n/(ㅇ), /g/(ㄱ) were influenced by the platal plates, but the kind of the palatal plates did not show any significance. 5. As for the lenis/fortis, lenis was influenced more by the kind of the palatal plates. 6. As for the influence of vowels upon each segment in the tested words, palatal vowel /i/(ㅣ) had greater influence than pharyngeal vowel /a/(ㅏ), and following vowels than preceding vowels.

• Journal of the Korea Computer Graphics Society
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• v.26 no.3
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• pp.49-59
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• 2020

In this paper, we propose a speech animation synthesis specialized in Korean through a rule-based co-articulation model. Speech animation has been widely used in the cultural industry, such as movies, animations, and games that require natural and realistic motion. Because the technique for audio driven speech animation has been mainly developed for English, however, the animation results for domestic content are often visually very unnatural. For example, dubbing of a voice actor is played with no mouth motion at all or with an unsynchronized looping of simple mouth shapes at best. Although there are language-independent speech animation models, which are not specialized in Korean, they are yet to ensure the quality to be utilized in a domestic content production. Therefore, we propose a natural speech animation synthesis method that reflects the linguistic characteristics of Korean driven by an input audio and text. Reflecting the features that vowels mostly determine the mouth shape in Korean, a coarticulation model separating lips and the tongue has been defined to solve the previous problem of lip distortion and occasional missing of some phoneme characteristics. Our model also reflects the differences in prosodic features for improved dynamics in speech animation. Through user studies, we verify that the proposed model can synthesize natural speech animation.

• The Journal of Korean Institute of Communications and Information Sciences
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• v.21 no.3
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• pp.600-611
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• 1996

Recently, neural network-based speech recognition has been studied to utilize the adaptivity and learnability of neural network models. However, conventional neural network models have difficulty in the co-articulation processing and the boundary detection of similar phonmes of the Korean speech. Also, in case of using one phonotopic map, learning speed may dramatically increase and inaccuracies may be caused because homogeneous learning and recognition method should be applied for heterogenous data. Hence, in this paper, a neural net typewriter has been designed using a hierarchical self-organizing classifier(HSOC), and related algorithms are presented. This HSOC, during its learing stage, distributed phoneme data on hierarchically structured multiple phonotopic maps, using Kohonen's self-organizing feature maps(SOFM). Presented and experimented in this paper were the algorithms for deciding the number of maps, map sizes, the selection of phonemes and their placement per map, an approapriate learning and preprocessing method per map. If maps are divided according to a priorlinguistic knowledge, we would have difficulty in acquiring linguistic knowledge and how to alpply it(e.g., processing extended phonemes). Contrarily, our HSOC has an advantage that multiple phonotopic maps suitable for given input data are self-organizable. The resulting three korean phonotopic maps are optimally labelled and have their own optimal preprocessing schemes, and also confirm to the conventional linguistic knowledge.

• Journal of KIISE:Software and Applications
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• v.37 no.10
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• pp.788-801
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• 2010

Advancing of mobile device is remarkable, so the research on mobile input device is getting more important issue. There are lots of input devices such as keypad, QWERTY keypad, touch and speech recognizer, but they are not as convenient as typical keyboard-based desktop input devices so input strings usually contain many typing errors. These input errors are not trouble with communication among person, but it has very critical problem with searching in database, such as dictionary and address book, we can not obtain correct results. Especially, Hangeul has more than 10,000 different characters because one Hangeul character is made by combination of consonants and vowels, frequency of error is higher than English. Generally, suffix tree is the most widely used data structure to deal with errors of query, but it is not enough for variety errors. In this paper, we propose fast approximate Korean word searching system, which allows variety typing errors. This system includes several algorithms for applying general approximate string searching to Hangeul. And we present profanity filters by using proposed system. This system filters over than 90% of coined profanities.

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

• Journal of the Korea Society of Computer and Information
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• v.17 no.9
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• pp.75-84
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• 2012

HMM-based Text-to-Speech systems generally utilize context dependent tri-phone units from a large corpus speech DB to enhance the synthetic speech. To downsize a large corpus speech DB, acoustically similar tri-phone units are clustered based on the decision tree using context dependent information. Context dependent information includes phoneme sequence as well as prosodic information because the naturalness of synthetic speech highly depends on the prosody such as pause, intonation pattern, and segmental duration. However, if the prosodic information was complicated, many context dependent phonemes would have no examples in the training data, and clustering would provide a smoothed feature which will generate unnatural synthetic speech. In this paper, instead of complicate prosodic information we propose a simple three prosodic boundary types and decision tree questions that use rising tone, falling tone, and monotonic tone to improve naturalness. Experimental results show that our proposed method can improve naturalness of a HMM-based Korean TTS and get high MOS in the perception test.

• The Journal of the Convergence on Culture Technology
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• v.6 no.2
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• pp.509-514
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• 2020

The conventional TTS system consists of several modules, including text preprocessing, parsing analysis, grapheme-to-phoneme conversion, boundary analysis, prosody control, acoustic feature generation by acoustic model, and synthesized speech generation. But TTS system with deep learning is composed of Text2Mel process that generates spectrogram from text, and vocoder that synthesizes speech signals from spectrogram. In this paper, for the optimal Korean TTS system construction we apply Tacotron2 to Tex2Mel process, and as a vocoder we introduce the methods such as WaveNet, WaveRNN, and WaveGlow, and implement them to verify and compare their performance. Experimental results show that WaveNet has the highest MOS and the trained model is hundreds of megabytes in size, but the synthesis time is about 50 times the real time. WaveRNN shows MOS performance similar to that of WaveNet and the model size is several tens of megabytes, but this method also cannot be processed in real time. WaveGlow can handle real-time processing, but the model is several GB in size and MOS is the worst of the three vocoders. From the results of this study, the reference criteria for selecting the appropriate method according to the hardware environment in the field of applying the TTS system are presented in this paper.