• Phonetics and Speech Sciences
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• v.3 no.1
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• pp.35-43
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• 2011

The purpose of this paper is to evaluate the viability of employing the intonation exaggeration technique proposed in [4] in teaching English prosody to university students. Fifty-six female university students, twenty-two in a control group and the other thirty-four in an experimental group, participated in a teaching experiment as part of their regular coursework for a five-and-a-half week period. For the study material of the experimental group, a set of utterances was synthesized whose intonation contours had been exaggerated whereas the control group was given the same set without any intonation modification. Recordings from both before and after the teaching experiment were made and one sentence set was chosen for analysis. The parameters analyzed were the pitch range, words containing the highest and lowest pitch points, and the 3-dimensional comparison of the three prosodic features [2]. An AXB and subjective rating test were also performed along with a qualitative screening of the individual intonation contours. The results showed that the experimental group performed slightly better in that their intonation contour was more similar to that of the model native speaker's utterance. This appears to suggest that the intonation exaggeration technique can be employed in teaching English prosody to students.

• Journal of the Korean Society for Library and Information Science
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• v.46 no.1
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• pp.163-181
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• 2012

We investigated how useful video tags were in summarizing video speech and how valuable positional information was for speech summarization. Furthermore, we examined the similarity among sentences selected for a speech summary to reduce its redundancy. Based on such analysis results, we then designed and evaluated a method for automatically summarizing speech transcripts using a modified Maximum Marginal Relevance model. This model did not only reduce redundancy but it also enabled the use of social tags, title words, and sentence positional information. Finally, we compared the proposed method to the Extractor system in which key sentences of a video speech were chosen using the frequency and location information of speech content words. Results showed that the precision and recall rates of the proposed method were higher than those of the Extractor system, although there was no significant difference in the recall rates.

• The Journal of the Acoustical Society of Korea
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• v.25 no.6
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• pp.277-281
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• 2006

This paper presents a method for the automatic recognition of pitch accents over syllables. The method that we propose is based on the time-delay recursive neural network (TDRNN). which is a neural network classifier with two different representation of dynamic context: the delayed input nodes allow the representation of an explicit trajectory F0(t) along time. while the recursive nodes provide long-term context information that reflects the characteristics of pitch accentuation in spoken English. We apply the TDRNN to pitch accent recognition in two forms: in the normal TDRNN. all of the prosodic features (pitch. energy, duration) are used as an entire set in a single TDRNN. while in the distributed TDRNN. the network consists of several TDRNNs each taking a single prosodic feature as the input. The final output of the distributed TDRNN is weighted sum of the output of individual TDRNN. We used the Boston Radio News Corpus (BRNC) for the experiments on the speaker-independent pitch accent recognition. π 1e experimental results show that the distributed TDRNN exhibits an average recognition accuracy of 83.64% over both pitch events and non-events.

• Journal of the Korean Institute of Telematics and Electronics B
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• v.33B no.1
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• pp.96-107
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• 1996

A voice personality transformation algorithm using orthogonal vector space conversion is proposed in this paper. Voice personality transformation is the process of changing one person's acoustic features (source) to those of another person (target). In this paper, personality transformation is achieved by changing the LPC cepstrum coefficients, excitation spectrum and pitch contour. An orthogonal vector space conversion technique is proposed to transform the LPC cepstrum coefficients. The LPC cepstrum transformation is implemented by principle component decomposition by applying the Karhunen-Loeve transformation and minimum mean-square error coordinate transformation(MSECT). Additionally, we propose a pitch contour modification method to transform the prosodic characteristics of any speaker. To do this, reference pitch patterns for source and target speaker are firstly built up, and speaker's one. The experimental results show the effectiveness of the proposed algorithm in both subjective and objective evaluations.

• Proceedings of the KSPS conference
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• 1996.10a
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• pp.574-575
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• 1996

The theme of the current study is to study intonation of Taiwanese(Tw.) by comparing the intonation patterns in native language (Ll), target language (L2), and interlanguage (IL). Studies on interlanguage have dealt primarily with segments. Though there were studies which addressed to the issues of interlanguage intonation, more often than not, they didn't offer evidence for the statement, and the hypotheses were mainly based on impression. Therefore, a formal description of interlanguage intonation is necessary for further development in this field. The basic assumption of this study is that native speakers of one language perceive and produce a second language in ways closely related to the patterns of their first language. Several studies on interlanguage prosody have suggested that prosodic structure and rules are more subject to transfer than certain other phonological phenomena, given their abstract structural nature and generality(Vogel 1991). Broselow(1988) also shows that interlanguage may provide evidence for particular analyses of the native language grammar, which may not be available from the study of the native language alone. Several research questions will be addressed in the current study: A. How does duration vary among native and nominative utterances\ulcorner The results shows that there is a significant difference in duration between the beginning English learners, and the native speakers of American English for all the eleven English sentences. The mean duration shows that the beginning English learners take almost twice as much time (1.70sec.), as Americans (O.97sec.) to produce English sentences. The results also show that American speakers take significant longer time to speak all ten Taiwanese utterances. The mean duration shows that Americans take almost twice as much time (2.24sec.) as adult Taiwanese (1.14sec.) to produce Taiwanese sentences. B. Does proficiency level influence the performance of interlanguage intonation\ulcorner Can native intonation patterns be achieved by a non-native speaker\ulcorner Wenk(1986) considers proficiency level might be a variable which related to the extent of Ll influence. His study showed that beginners do transfer rhythmic features of the Ll and advanced learners can and do succeed in overcoming mother-tongue influence. The current study shows that proficiency level does play a role in the acquisition of English intonation by Taiwanese speakers. The duration and pitch range of the advanced learners are much closer to those of the native American English speakers than the beginners, but even advanced learners still cannot achieve native-like intonation patterns. C. Do Taiwanese have a narrower pitch range in comparison with American English speakers\ulcorner Ross et. al.(1986) suggests that the presence of tone in a language significantly inhibits the unrestricted manipulation of three acoustical measures of prosody which are involved in producing local pitch changes in the fundamental frequency contour during affective signaling. Will the presence of tone in a language inhibit the ability of speakers to modulate intonation\ulcorner The results do show that Taiwanese have a narrower pitch range in comparison with American English speakers. Both advanced (84Hz) and beginning learners (58Hz) of English show a significant narrower FO range than that of Americans' (112Hz), and the difference is greater between the beginning learners' group and native American English speakers.