• Phonetics and Speech Sciences
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• v.15 no.2
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• pp.21-29
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• 2023

This study investigates the transitional aspect of vowel harmony in Korean verbal conjugation. By observing the patterns of harmonic and disharmonic tokens of 42 verbal stems searched for in the National Institute of Korean Language (NIKL) Korean Dialogue Corpus 2020/2021, I found that disharmonic tokens appeared less than 0.1% of time, most of which consisted of an /a/-stem with a monosyllabic sentence-final suffix. It was noted that disharmonic pattern started to spread to other suffixes and possibly to /o/-stems. A simple perception test showed that the disharmonic forms might have originated from vowel reduction or undershoot. These results suggest that the ongoing change is accounted for from both the articulatory and perceptual perspectives.

• Asia Marketing Journal
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• v.12 no.4
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• pp.1-25
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• 2011

Brand names are often considered as a part of product and important extrinsic cues of product evaluation, when consumers make purchasing decisions. For a company, brand names are also important assets. Building a strong brand name in the Chinese commonwealth is a main challenge for many global companies. One of the first problem global company has to face is how to translate English brand name into Chinese brand name. It is very difficult decision because of cultural and linguistic differences. Western languages are based on an alphabet phonetic system, whereas Chinese are based on ideogram. Chinese speakers are more likely to recall stimuli presented as brand names in visual rather than spoken recall, whereas English speakers are more likely to recall the names in spoken rather than in visual recall. We interpret these findings in terms of the fact that mental representations of verbal information in Chinese are coded primarily in a visual manner, whereas verbal information in English is coded by primarily in a phonological manner. A key linguistic differences that would affect the decision to standardize or localize when transferring English brand name to Chinese brand name is the writing system. Prior Chinese brand naming research suggests that popular Chinese naming translations foreign companies adopt are phonetic, semantic, and phonosemantic translation. The phonetic translation refers to the speech sound that is produced, such as the pronunciation of the brand name. The semantic translation involves the actual meaning of and association made with the brand name. The phonosemantic translation preserves the sound of the brand name and brand meaning. Prior brand naming research has dealt with word-level analysis in examining English brand name that are desirable for improving memorability. We predict Chinese brand name suggestiveness with different translation methods lead to different levels of consumers' evaluations. This research investigates the structural linguistic characteristics of the Chinese language and its impact on the brand name evaluation. Otherwise purpose of this study is to examine the effect of brand concept on the evaluation of brand name. We also want to examine whether the evaluation is moderated by Chinese translation types. 178 Taiwanese participants were recruited for the research. The following findings are from the empirical analysis on the hypotheses established in this study. In the functional brand concept, participants in Chinese translation by semantic were likely to evaluate positively than Chinese translation by phonetic. On the contrary, in the symbolic brand concept condition, participants in Chinese translation by phonetic evaluated positively than by semantic. And then, we found Chinese translation by phonosemantic was most favorable evaluations regardless of brand concept. The implications of these findings are discussed for Chinese commonwealth marketers with respect to brand name strategies. The proposed model helps companies to effectively select brand name, making it highly applicable for academia and practitioner. name and brand meaning. Prior brand naming research has dealt with word-level analysis in examining English brand name that are desirable for improving memorability. We predict Chinese brand name suggestiveness with different translation methods lead to different levels of consumers' evaluations. This research investigates the structural linguistic characteristics of the Chinese language and its impact on the brand name evaluation. Otherwise purpose of this study is to examine the effect of brand concept on the evaluation of brand name. We also want to examine whether the evaluation is moderated by Chinese translation types. 178 Taiwanese participants were recruited for the research. The following findings are from the empirical analysis on the hypotheses established in this study. In the functional brand concept, participants in Chinese translation by semantic were likely to evaluate positively than Chinese translation by phonetic. On the contrary, in the symbolic brand concept condition, participants in Chinese translation by phonetic evaluated positively than by semantic. And then, we found Chinese translation by phonosemantic was most favorable evaluations regardless of brand concept. The implications of these findings are discussed for Chinese commonwealth marketers with respect to brand name strategies. The proposed model helps companies to effectively select brand name, making it highly applicable for academia and practitioner.

• Proceedings of the Korea Information Processing Society Conference
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• 2021.05a
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• pp.411-414
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• 2021

One of the elements of technology that has become extremely critical within the field of education today is Deep learning. It has been especially used in the area of natural language processing, with some word-representation vectors playing a critical role. However, some of the low-resource languages, such as Swahili, which is spoken in East and Central Africa, do not fall into this category. Natural Language Processing is a field of artificial intelligence where systems and computational algorithms are built that can automatically understand, analyze, manipulate, and potentially generate human language. After coming to discover that some African languages fail to have a proper representation within language processing, even going so far as to describe them as lower resource languages because of inadequate data for NLP, we decided to study the Swahili language. As it stands currently, language modeling using neural networks requires adequate data to guarantee quality word representation, which is important for natural language processing (NLP) tasks. Most African languages have no data for such processing. The main aim of this project is to recognize and focus on the classification of words in English, Swahili, and Korean with a particular emphasis on the low-resource Swahili language. Finally, we are going to create our own dataset and reprocess the data using Python Script, formulate the syllabic alphabet, and finally develop an English, Swahili, and Korean word analogy dataset.

• Journal of Korean language education
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• v.28 no.2
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• pp.1-36
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• 2017

This study investigated the correlation between learners' psychological and social factors and their syntactic complexity of speaking. The study collected samples of Korean spoken production of 61 learners with English, Chinese, Japanese and other L1 backgrounds and applied mini-TOPIK, mini-AMTB, and SASIQ for 70 minutes. The study found that: (i) integrative motivation showed positive correlation with a number of simple complex clauses, but instrumental motivation correlated negatively with a number of adverbial clauses, indicating that high motivation hindered producing highly complex clauses although it triggered producing simple complex clauses, (ii) social contact with L2 native speakers showed positive correlation with general L2 development and a number of simple complex clauses, but revealed negative correlation with double or triple complex clauses, (iii) hours of L2 listening showed very strong positive correlation with producing triple complex clauses and general proficiency, but indicated negative correlation with a number of simple complex clauses. The study reported that high motivation toward Korean learning and active social activities with Korean native speakers helped produce simple complex clauses while hours of listening to Korean helped produce triple complex clauses.

• Smart Media Journal
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• v.12 no.1
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• pp.32-46
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• 2023

Natural Language Processing (NLP) has grown tremendously in recent years. Typically, bilingual, and multilingual translation models have been deployed widely in machine translation and gained vast attention from the research community. On the contrary, few studies have focused on translating between spoken and sign languages, especially non-English languages. Prior works on Sign Language Translation (SLT) have shown that a mid-level sign gloss representation enhances translation performance. Therefore, this study presents a new large-scale Korean sign language dataset, the Museum-Commentary Korean Sign Gloss (MCKSG) dataset, including 3828 pairs of Korean sentences and their corresponding sign glosses used in Museum-Commentary contexts. In addition, we propose a translation framework based on self-supervised learning, where the pretext task is a text-to-text from a Korean sentence to its back-translation versions, then the pre-trained network will be fine-tuned on the MCKSG dataset. Using self-supervised learning help to overcome the drawback of a shortage of sign language data. Through experimental results, our proposed model outperforms a baseline BERT model by 6.22%.

• Speech Sciences
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• v.10 no.4
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• pp.7-21
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• 2003

Sums-of-Products models were built for segment duration prediction of spoken Korean. An experiment for the modelling was carried out to apply the results to Korean text-to-speech synthesis systems. 670 read sentences were analyzed. trained and tested for the construction of the duration models. Traditional sequential rule systems were extended to simple additive, multiplicative and additive-multiplicative models based on Sums-of-Products modelling. The parameters used in the modelling include the properties of the target segment and its neighbors and the target segment's position in the prosodic structure. Two optimisation strategies were used: the downhill simplex method and the simulated annealing method. The performance of the models was measured by the correlation coefficient and the root mean squared prediction error (RMSE) between actual and predicted duration in the test data. The best performance was obtained when the data was trained and tested by ' additive-multiplicative models. ' The correlation for the vowel duration prediction was 0.69 and the RMSE. 31.80 ms. while the correlation for the consonant duration prediction was 0.54 and the RMSE. 29.02 ms. The results were not good enough to be applied to the real-time text-to-speech systems. Further investigation of feature interactions is required for the better performance of the Sums-of-Products models.

• Phonetics and Speech Sciences
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• v.12 no.2
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• pp.1-7
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• 2020

This paper investigates the phonological processes of consonants in pronounced words in the Seoul Corpus, and compares the frequency distribution of these processes to provide a clearer understanding of conversational Korean to linguists and teachers. To this end, both orthographic and pronounced words were extracted from the transcribed label scripts of the Seoul Corpus. Next, the phonological processes of consonants in the orthographic and pronounced forms were tabulated separately after syllabifying the onsets and codas, and major consonantal processes were examined. First, the results showed that the majority of the orthographic consonants' sounds were pronounced the same way as their pronounced forms. Second, more than three quarters of the onsets were pronounced as the same forms, while approximately half of the codas were pronounced as variants. Third, the majority of different onset and coda symbols were primarily caused by deletions and insertions. Finally, the five phonological process types accounted for only 12.4% of the total possible procedures. Based on these results, this paper concludes that an analysis of phonological processes in spontaneous speech corpora can improve the practical understanding of spoken Korean. Future studies ought to compare the current phonological process data with those of other languages to establish universal patterns in phonological processes.

• The Journal of Korean Association of Computer Education
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• v.3 no.1
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• pp.135-142
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• 2000

Recently the user of distance education system using Intemet-Web are increasing rapidly. This paper shows that Hierarchical WBI documents generator by using CGI is devised and applied to development of distance education system for group-level spoken english. This overcomes the problems of the ready-made programs, which took a lot of time and cost. To generate WBI documents, The key is established to each document saved in server by types of the hierarchical structure and is transmitted to client. By client transmitting this key to server when next documentary is required. Sever can know what documents the client needs. The WBI documentary generator tells the keys transmitted from the client, automatically generates a new documentary to send, and delivery it.

• Annual Conference on Human and Language Technology
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• 2010.10a
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• pp.136-140
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• 2010

본 논문은 지식경제부의 지원 하에 한국전자통신연구원 언어처리연구팀에서 2010년에 개발하고 있는 패턴기반 영한 메신저 대화체 문장 번역 시스템에 관한 것이다. 본 논문의 목표는 문어체 문장 위주의 패턴기반 영한 웹문서 자동번역 시스템을 대화체 문장 위주의 패턴기반 영한 메신저 자동번역 시스템으로 전환하고자 할 때, 특화하는 방법 및 모듈에 관해 기술하는 것이다. 영어권 Native speaker로부터 수집한 메신저 대화체 문장을 대상으로 번역률을 평가한 결과, 문어체 위주의 영한 웹 자동번역 시스템은 71.83%인 반면, 대화체 위주의 영한 메신저 자동번역 시스템은 76.88%였다. 대화체 문장을 대상으로 번역률을 5.05% 향상시킬 수 있었던 이유는 본 논문에서 제시한 특화 방법을 따른 결과라고 할 수 있다.

• Phonetics and Speech Sciences
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• v.8 no.1
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• pp.37-44
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• 2016

The goal of the current study is to investigate how the sound change is reflected in production or in perception, and what the effect of lexical frequency is on the loss of sound contrasts. Specifically, the current study examined whether the vowel length contrasts are retained in Korean speakers' productions, and whether Korean listeners can distinguish vowel length minimal pairs in their perception. Two production experiments and two perception experiments investigated this. For production tests, twelve Korean native speakers in their 20s and 40s completed a read-aloud task as well as a map-task. The results showed that, regardless of their age group, all Korean speakers produced vowel length contrasts with a small but significant differences in the read-aloud test. Interestingly, the difference between long and short vowels has disappeared in the map task, indicating that the speech mode affects producing vowel length contrasts. For perception tests, thirty-three Korean listeners completed a discrimination and a forced-choice identification test. The results showed that Korean listeners still have a perceptual sensitivity to distinguish lexical meaning of the vowel length minimal pair. We also found that the identification accuracy was affected by the word frequency, showing a higher identification accuracy in high- and mid- frequency words than low frequency words. Taken together, the current study demonstrated that the speech mode (read-aloud vs. spontaneous) affects the production of the sound undergoing a language change; and word frequency affects the sound change in speech perception.