• Science of Emotion and Sensibility
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• v.23 no.2
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• pp.61-74
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• 2020

Voice user interface has become a commercially viable and extensive interaction mechanism with the development of voice assistants. Despite the popularity of voice assistants, the academic community does not utterly understand about what, when, and how users chat with them. Chatting with a voice assistant is crucial as it defines how a user will seek the help of the assistant in the future. This study aims to cover the essence and construct of conversational AI, to develop a classification method to deal with user utterances, and, most importantly, to understand about what, when, and how Chinese users chat with voice assistants. We collected user utterances from the real conventional database of a commercial voice assistant, NetEase Sing in China. We also identified different utterance categories on the basis of previous studies and real usage conditions and annotated the utterances with 17 labels. Furthermore, we found that the three top reasons for the usage of voice assistants in China are the following: (1) greeting, (2) function, and (3) music. Chinese users like to interact with voice assistants at night from 7 PM to 10 PM, and they are polite toward the assistants. The whole percentage of negative feedback utterances is less than 6%, which is considerably low. These findings appear to be useful in voice interaction designs for intelligent hardware.

• Speech Sciences
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• v.10 no.2
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• pp.237-248
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• 2003

This paper compares the syllable structure of French and Korean analyzing the speech data of these two languages recorded during the actual speech. Reference to the syllable structure of French is made from F. Wioland's research data. As for the Korean data, the primary data are drawn from the 30-minute radio interview in which two male TV anchors in their early 60s talk to each other. The secondary source of the data is collected by having the primary data replicated by the two male announcers in their early 20's broadcasting in the university ra야o station of KAIST. With reference to the data collected in French and Korean, this paper provides the statistical frequency of each type of syllable structure in each language through the acoustic analysis of the spectrograms and renders a phonetic account of the characteristics of each syllable type in the two languages. Also discussed in this paper is the distributional condition in which each syllable structure is laid out in the speech context.

• The Journal of Korean Institute of Next Generation Computing
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• v.13 no.6
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• pp.96-105
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• 2017

In this paper, we investigated the age classification from the speaker by analyzing the voice calls of the emergency center. We classified the adult and elderly from the call center calls using behavioral speech utterances and SVM(Support Vector Machine) which is a machine learning classifier. We selected two behavioral speech utterances through analysis of the call data from the emergency center: Silent Pause and Turn-taking latency. First, the criteria for age classification selected through analysis based on the behavioral speech utterances of the emergency call center and then it was significant(p <0.05) through statistical analysis. We analyzed 200 datasets (adult: 100, elderly: 100) by the 5 fold cross-validation using the SVM(Support Vector Machine) classifier. As a result, we achieved 70% accuracy using two behavioral speech utterances. It is higher accuracy than one behavioral speech utterance. These results can be suggested age classification as a new method which is used behavioral speech utterances and will be classified by combining acoustic information(MFCC) with new behavioral speech utterances of the real voice data in the further work. Furthermore, it will contribute to the development of the emergency situation judgment system related to the age classification.

• MALSORI
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• no.61
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• pp.49-62
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• 2007

This study focused on the improvement of prosody transplantation technology to be used for effective prosody education. Issues making the technology a less acceptable tool for prosody education were addressed. Instead of merely copying the target pitch onto a learner's utterances, the target pitch was resealed in semitone before the transplantation. In so doing, distortion of a signal was minimized and the transplanted utterance could have the quality of sound not different from the learner's utterances. Instead of manual transplantation, an automatic procedure was proposed to increase the reliability and the consistency of the outcome and enable real time processing. The perceptual performance of the automatic transplantation was evaluated by the perception experiment showing the automatic ransplantation was as good as the manual process.

• Journal of KIISE:Software and Applications
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• v.30 no.3_4
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• pp.278-284
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• 2003

Speech act is the speaker's intentions indicated through utterances. It is important for understanding natural language dialogues and generating responses. This paper proposes the method of two stage that increases the performance of the korean speech act decision. The first stage is to select features from the part of speech results in sentence and from the context that uses previous speech acts. We use x$^2$ statistics(CHI) for selecting features that have showed high performance in text categorization. The second stage is to determine speech act with selected features and Neural Network. The proposed method shows the possibility of automatic speech act decision using only POS results, makes good performance by using the higher informative features and speed up by decreasing the number of features. We tested the system using our proposed method in Korean dialogue corpus transcribed from recording in real fields, and this corpus consists of 10,285 utterances and 17 speech acts. We trained it with 8,349 utterances and have test it with 1,936 utterances, obtained the correct speech act for 1,709 utterances(88.3%). This result is about 8% higher accuracy than without selecting features.

• Proceedings of the Acoustical Society of Korea Conference
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• spring
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• pp.147-150
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• 2002

This paper describes procedures to implement a real-time pitch analyzer using Matlab. Matlab is a multi-purpose signal-processing tool. Using this tool real-time analysis tool is implemented. To make it real-time we used data acquisition toolbox which comes with Matlab. Autocorrelation method was used as a basic algorithm. The resulting pitch informations are displayed in two different forms, i.e. instantaneous pitch plot and pitch track. V/UV decision is performed using zero crossing rate and energy Informations based on 500 utterances.

• Proceedings of the KSPS conference
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• 2006.05a
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• pp.89-93
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• 2006

This paper presents ETRI broadcast news speech recognition system. There are two major issues on the broadcast news speech recognition: 1) real-time processing and 2) out-of-vocabulary handling. For real-time processing, we devised the dual decoder architecture. The input speech signal is segmented based on the long-pause between utterances, and each decoder processes the speech segment alternatively. One decoder can start to recognize the current speech segment without waiting for the other decoder to recognize the previous speech segment completely. Thus, the processing delay is not accumulated. For out-of-vocabulary handling, we updated both the vocabulary and the language model, based on the recent news articles on the internet. By updating the language model as well as the vocabulary, we can improve the performance up to 17.2% ERR.

• MALSORI
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• no.47
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• pp.15-29
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• 2003

When intonation in French is analysed in terms of a multi-dimentional and hierarchical structure, each of the prosodic units such as accent phrases(having different combinations of the basic tonemes L and H), pre-sentencial and post-sentencial long pauses, intonation phrases(containing boundary intonation), as well as intermediate phrases can be considered being realized on a separate tier. Unlike on the tiers where accent phrases and intonation phrases occur, an intonation rhythm consisting of plateaus is realised on that of intermediate phrases. This intonation rhythm consisting of plateaus is one of the significant factors that lead a basic French metrical rhythm. This paper first shows the types of combinations of the basic tonemes L and H found in French accent phrases. Secondly, this paper examines the roles intermediate phrases and plateaus play in French. Finally, this paper argues that intermediate phrases are the metrical units actually adopted as real utterance units in French.

• Journal of the Korean Society of Manufacturing Technology Engineers
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• v.20 no.2
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• pp.207-213
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• 2011

In this paper, we present a study on the real-time implementation of mobile robot to which the interactive voice recognition technique is applied. The speech command utters the sentential connected word and asserted through the wireless remote control system. We implement an automatic distance speech command recognition system for voice-enabled services interactively. We construct a baseline automatic speech command recognition system, where acoustic models are trained from speech utterances spoken by a microphone. In order to improve the performance of the baseline automatic speech recognition system, the acoustic models are adapted to adjust the spectral characteristics of speech according to different microphones and the environmental mismatches between cross talking and distance speech. We illustrate the performance of the developed speech recognition system by experiments. As a result, it is illustrated that the average rates of proposed speech recognition system shows about 95% above.

• Journal of KIISE:Software and Applications
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• v.32 no.10
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• pp.990-1002
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• 2005

To generate coherent texts, it is important to produce appropriate pronouns to refer to previously-mentioned things in a discourse. Specifically, we focus on pronominalization by zero pronouns which frequently occur in Korean. This paper investigates zero pronouns in Korean based on the cost-based centering theory, especially focusing on the center transitions of adjacent utterances. In previous centering works, only one type of nominal entity has been considered as the target of pronominalization, even though other entities are frequently pronominalized as zero pronouns. To resolve this problem, and explain the reference phenomena of real texts, four types of nominal entity (Npair, Ninter, Nintra, and Nnon) from centering theory are defined with the concept of inter-, intra-, and pairwise salience. For each entity type, a case study of zero phenomena is performed through analyzing corpus and building a pronominalization model. This study shows that the zero phenomena of entities which have been neglected in previous centering works are explained via the renter transition of the second previous utterance. We also show that in Ninter, Nintra, and Nnon, pronominalization accuracy achieved by complex combination of several types of features is completely or nearly achieved by using the second previous utterance's transition across genres.