• MALSORI
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• no.49
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• pp.107-121
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• 2004

In this paper, we describe a cross-morpheme pronunciation variation model which is especially useful for constructing morpheme-based pronunciation lexicon to improve the performance of a Korean LVCSR. There are a lot of pronunciation variations occurring at morpheme boundaries in continuous speech. Since phonemic context together with morphological category and morpheme boundary information affect Korean pronunciation variations, we have distinguished phonological rules that can be applied to phonemes in within-morpheme and cross-morpheme. The results of 33K-morpheme Korean CSR experiments show that an absolute reduction of 1.45% in WER from the baseline performance of 18.42% WER was achieved by modeling proposed pronunciation variations with a possible multiple context-dependent pronunciation lexicon.

• Phonetics and Speech Sciences
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• v.7 no.3
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• pp.139-149
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• 2015

This paper aims to analyze pronunciation variations of loanwords produced by Korean and improve the performance of pronunciation modeling of loanwords in Korean by using syllable-based segmentation and phonological knowledge. The loanword text corpus used for our experiment consists of 14.5k words extracted from the frequently used words in set-top box, music, and point-of-interest (POI) domains. At first, pronunciations of loanwords in Korean are obtained by manual transcriptions, which are used as target pronunciations. The target pronunciations are compared with the standard pronunciation using confusion matrices for analysis of pronunciation variation patterns of loanwords. Based on the confusion matrices, three salient pronunciation variations of loanwords are identified such as tensification of fricative [s] and derounding of rounded vowel [ɥi] and [$w{\varepsilon}$]. In addition, a syllable-based segmentation method considering phonological knowledge is proposed for loanword pronunciation modeling. Performance of the baseline and the proposed method is measured using phone error rate (PER)/word error rate (WER) and F-score at various context spans. Experimental results show that the proposed method outperforms the baseline. We also observe that performance degrades when training and test sets come from different domains, which implies that loanword pronunciations are influenced by data domains. It is noteworthy that pronunciation modeling for loanwords is enhanced by reflecting phonological knowledge. The loanword pronunciation modeling in Korean proposed in this paper can be used for automatic speech recognition of application interface such as navigation systems and set-top boxes and for computer-assisted pronunciation training for Korean learners of English.

• Proceedings of the KSPS conference
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• 2003.05a
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• pp.75-78
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• 2003

In this paper, we describe a cross-morpheme pronunciation variation model which is especially useful for constructing morpheme-based pronunciation lexicon for Korean LVCSR. There are a lot of pronunciation variations occurring at morpheme boundaries in continuous speech. Since phonemic context together with morphological category and morpheme boundary information affect Korean pronunciation variations, we have distinguished pronunciation variation rules according to the locations such as within a morpheme, across a morpheme boundary in a compound noun, across a morpheme boundary in an eojeol, and across an eojeol boundary. In 33K-morpheme Korean CSR experiment, an absolute improvement of 1.16％ in WER from the baseline performance of 23.17％ WER is achieved by modeling cross-morpheme pronunciation variations with a context-dependent multiple pronunciation lexicon.

• Proceedings of the KSPS conference
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• 2003.05a
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• pp.168-171
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• 2003

This study is about modeling pronunciation dictionary necessary for PLU(phoneme like unit) level word recognition. The recognition of nonnative speakers' pronunciation enables an automatic diagnosis and an error detection which are the core of English pronunciation tutoring system. The above system needs two pronunciation dictionaries. One is for representing standard English pronunciation. The other is for representing Korean speakers' English Pronunciation. Both dictionaries are integrated to generate pronunciation networks for variants.

• MALSORI
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• v.55
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• pp.103-118
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• 2005

In this paper, we describe a morpheme-based pronunciation lexicon useful for Korean LVCSR. The phonemic-context-dependent multiple pronunciation lexicon improves the recognition accuracy when cross-morpheme pronunciation variations are distinguished from within-morpheme pronunciation variations. Since adding all possible pronunciation variants to the lexicon increases the lexicon size and confusability between lexical entries, we have developed a lexicon pruning scheme for optimal selection of pronunciation variants to improve the performance of Korean LVCSR. By building a proposed pronunciation lexicon, an absolute reduction of $0.56\%$ in WER from the baseline performance of $27.39\%$ WER is achieved by cross-morpheme pronunciation variations model with a phonemic-context-dependent multiple pronunciation lexicon. On the best performance, an additional reduction of the lexicon size by $5.36\%$ is achieved from the same lexical entries.

• Phonetics and Speech Sciences
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• v.8 no.4
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• pp.103-113
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• 2016

This paper aims to propose articulatory features as novel predictors for automatic pronunciation assessment of English produced by Korean learners. Based on the distinctive feature theory, where phonemes are represented as a set of articulatory/phonetic properties, we propose articulatory Goodness-Of-Pronunciation(aGOP) features in terms of the corresponding articulatory attributes, such as nasal, sonorant, anterior, etc. An English speech corpus spoken by Korean learners is used in the assessment modeling. In our system, learners' speech is forced aligned and recognized by using the acoustic and pronunciation models derived from the WSJ corpus (native North American speech) and the CMU pronouncing dictionary, respectively. In order to compute aGOP features, articulatory models are trained for the corresponding articulatory attributes. In addition to the proposed features, various features which are divided into four categories such as RATE, SEGMENT, SILENCE, and GOP are applied as a baseline. In order to enhance the assessment modeling performance and investigate the weights of the salient features, relevant features are extracted by using Best Subset Selection(BSS). The results show that the proposed model using aGOP features outperform the baseline. In addition, analysis of relevant features extracted by BSS reveals that the selected aGOP features represent the salient variations of Korean learners of English. The results are expected to be effective for automatic pronunciation error detection, as well.

• The Journal of the Acoustical Society of Korea
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• v.20 no.2
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• pp.35-43
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• 2001

Many speech recognition systems have used pronunciation lexicon with possible multiple phonetic transcriptions for each word. The pronunciation lexicon is of often manually created. This process requires a lot of time and efforts, and furthermore, it is very difficult to maintain consistency of lexicon. To handle these problems, we present a model based on morphophon-ological analysis for automatically generating Korean pronunciation variants. By analyzing phonological variations frequently found in spoken Korean, we have derived about 700 phonemic contexts that would trigger the multilevel application of the corresponding phonological process, which consists of phonemic and allophonic rules. In generating pronunciation variants, morphological analysis is preceded to handle variations of phonological words. According to the morphological category, a set of tables reflecting phonemic context is looked up to generate pronunciation variants. Our experiments show that the proposed model produces mostly correct pronunciation variants of phonological words. Then we estimated how useful the pronunciation lexicon and training phonetic transcription using this proposed systems.

• Journal of KIISE:Software and Applications
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• v.34 no.2
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• pp.104-111
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• 2007

This paper examines how the performance of an automatic speech recognizer was improved for Korean Point-of-Interest (POI) data by modeling pronunciation variation using structural prosodic information such as prosodic words and syllable length. First, multiple pronunciation variants are generated using prosodic words given that each POI word can be broken down into prosodic words. And the cross-prosodic-word variations were modeled considering the syllable length of word. A total of 81 experiments were conducted using 9 test sets (3 baseline and 6 proposed) on 9 trained sets (3 baseline, 6 proposed). The results show: (i) the performance was improved when the pronunciation lexica were generated using prosodic words; (ii) the best performance was achieved when the maximum number of variants was constrained to 3 based on the syllable length; and (iii) compared to the baseline word error rate (WER) of 4.63%, a maximum of 8.4% in WER reduction was achieved when both prosodic words and syllable length were considered.

• MALSORI
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• no.65
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• pp.93-103
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• 2008

In this paper, we propose a method for optimizing a multiple pronunciation dictionary used for modeling pronunciation variations of non-native speech. The proposed method removes some confusable pronunciation variants in the dictionary, resulting in a reduced dictionary size and less decoding time for automatic speech recognition (ASR). To this end, a confusability measure is first defined based on the Levenshtein distance between two different pronunciation variants. Then, the number of phonemes for each pronunciation variant is incorporated into the confusability measure to compensate for ASR errors due to words of a shorter length. We investigate the effect of the proposed method on ASR performance, where Korean is selected as the target language and Korean utterances spoken by Chinese native speakers are considered as non-native speech. It is shown from the experiments that an ASR system using the multiple pronunciation dictionary optimized by the proposed method can provide a relative average word error rate reduction of 6.25%, with 11.67% less ASR decoding time, as compared with that using a multiple pronunciation dictionary without the optimization.

• Proceedings of the IEEK Conference
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• 2002.07a
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• pp.321-324
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• 2002

For a rule-based conversion of Hangout into the Roman alphabet rather than a word-for-word conversion, one must come up with a faultless model for the Korean standard pronunciation rules, which are the basis of the Romanization. It is on this foundation that the Korean-Roman alphabet conversion table can be created. For linguistic modeling using PetriNet, modeling boundary and notation of modeling can be defined. In order to describe PetriNet, which is a dynamic modeling tool, as a static one, one can model the standard Korean pronunciation rules and the Hangout-Roman alphabet notation by conversion into incident matrix Thus, this research attempts to develop a mathematical modeling tool for a natural language using PetriNet, and create a Korean-Roman alphabet conversion table.