• The Journal of Korean Institute of Communications and Information Sciences
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• v.24 no.9B
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• pp.1767-1774
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• 1999

This paper is to synthesize Korean multi-syllabic speeches in the time domain using mono-syllables as a synthesis unit. Specially it is to control the shape forms of speech energy flows between the connection parts of syllables in the case of concatenation mono-syllables. For this it is controlled with the prosody parameters1) extracted from speech waveforms in the time domains and presented the experimental results controlled the energy flows by using the induced concatenation rules from the korean syllable shapeforms in connetion parts of syllables. In the results of experiments, it is removed the incontinuities of energy follows in the connection parts produced by concatenating the mono-syllables in the time domain and also improved the qualities and naturalites of synthesized speeches.

• The Journal of the Korea Contents Association
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• v.4 no.4
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• pp.65-70
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• 2004

In this paper, I propose a new extraction method of Individual Pitch Pulse in order to accommodate the changes in each pitch interval and reduce pitch errors in Speech Coding. The extraction rate of individual pitch pulses was $96\%$ for male voice and $85\%$ for female voice respectively. This method has the capability of being applied to many fields, such as speech coding, speech analysis, speech synthesis and speech recognition.

• ETRI Journal
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• v.28 no.6
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• pp.807-810
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• 2006

This letter presents a prediction model for sentence-final intonations for Korean conversational-style text-to-speech systems in which we introduce the linguistic feature of 'modality' as a new parameter. Based on their function and meaning, we classify tonal forms in speech data into tone types meaningful for speech synthesis and use the result of this classification to build our prediction model using a tree structured classification algorithm. In order to show that modality is more effective for the prediction model than features such as sentence type or speech act, an experiment is performed on a test set of 970 utterances with a training set of 3,883 utterances. The results show that modality makes a higher contribution to the determination of sentence-final intonation than sentence type or speech act, and that prediction accuracy improves up to 25% when the feature of modality is introduced.

• ETRI Journal
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• v.38 no.3
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• pp.425-434
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• 2016

A novel average magnitude difference function (AMDF)-based pitch detection scheme (PDS) is proposed to achieve better performance in speech quality. A performance evaluation of the proposed PDS is carried out through both a simulation and a real-time implementation of a speech analysis-synthesis system. The parameters used to compare the performance of the proposed PDS with that of PDSs that are based on either a cepstrum, an autocorrelation function (ACF), an AMDF, or circular AMDF (CAMDF) methods are as follows: percentage gross pitch error (%GPE); a subjective listening test; an objective speech quality assessment; a speech intelligibility test; a synthesized speech waveform; computation time; and memory consumption. The proposed PDS results in lower %GPE and better synthesized speech quality and intelligibility for different speech signals as compared to the cepstrum-, ACF-, AMDF-, and CAMDF-based PDSs. The computational time of the proposed PDS is also less than that for the cepstrum-, ACF-, and CAMDF-based PDSs. Moreover, the total memory consumed by the proposed PDS is less than that for the ACF- and cepstrum-based PDSs.

• KSII Transactions on Internet and Information Systems (TIIS)
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• v.14 no.8
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• pp.3473-3487
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• 2020

In this paper, we present a new approach to creating speech animation with emotional expressions using a small set of example models. To generate realistic facial animation, two example models called key visemes and expressions are used for lip-synchronization and facial expressions, respectively. The key visemes represent lip shapes of phonemes such as vowels and consonants while the key expressions represent basic emotions of a face. Our approach utilizes a text-to-speech (TTS) system to create a phonetic transcript for the speech animation. Based on a phonetic transcript, a sequence of speech animation is synthesized by interpolating the corresponding sequence of key visemes. Using an input parameter vector, the key expressions are blended by a method of scattered data interpolation. During the synthesizing process, an importance-based scheme is introduced to combine both lip-synchronization and facial expressions into one animation sequence in real time (over 120Hz). The proposed approach can be applied to diverse types of digital content and applications that use facial animation with high accuracy (over 90%) in speech recognition.

• Proceedings of the KSPS conference
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• 1996.10a
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• pp.435-447
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• 1996

In this paper, we propose the method that extracts the speech feature using the hearing model through signal processing techniques. The proposed method includes the following procedure ; normalization of the short-time speech block by its maximum value, multi-resolution analysis using the discrete wavelet transformation and re-synthesize using the discrete inverse wavelet transformation, differentiation after analysis and synthesis, full wave rectification and integration. In order to verify the performance of the proposed speech feature in the speech recognition task, korean digit recognition experiments were carried out using both the DTW and the VQ-HMM. The results showed that, in the case of using DTW, the recognition rates were 99.79% and 90.33% for speaker-dependent and speaker-independent task respectively and, in the case of using VQ-HMM, the rate were 96.5% and 81.5% respectively. And it indicates that the proposed speech feature has the potential for use as a simple and efficient feature for recognition task

• Phonetics and Speech Sciences
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• v.2 no.1
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• pp.87-95
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• 2010

In this paper, we address issues associated with mixed-lingual text-to-speech based on context-dependent HMMs, where there are multiple sets of HMMs corresponding to each individual language. In particular, we propose smoothing techniques of synthesis parameters at the boundaries between different languages to obtain more natural quality of speech. In other words, mel-frequency cepstral coefficients (MFCCs) at the language boundaries are smoothed by applying several linear and nonlinear approximation techniques. It is shown from an informal listening test that synthesized speech smoothed by a modified version of linear least square approximation (MLLSA) and a quadratic interpolation (QI) method is preferred than that without using any smoothing technique.

• Proceedings of the IEEK Conference
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• 2006.06a
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• pp.349-350
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• 2006

This paper presents very low bit rate speech coder, ZFE-CELP(ZINC Function Excitation-Code Excited Linear Prediction). The ZFE-CELP speech codec is based on a ZINC function and CELP modeling of the excitation signal respectively according to the frame characteristic such as a voiced speech and an unvoiced speech. And this paper suggest strategies to improve the speech quality of the very low bit rate speech coder.

• Proceedings of the Acoustical Society of Korea Conference
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• spring
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• pp.15-18
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• 2002

Prosodic features of speech are known to play an important role in the transmission of linguistic information in human conversation. Their roles in the transmission of para- and non- linguistic information are even much more. In spite of their importance in human conversation, from engineering viewpoint, research focuses are mainly placed on segmental features, and not so much on prosodic features. With the aim of promoting research works on prosody, a research project 'Prosody and Speech Processing' is now going on. A rough sketch of the project is first given in the paper. Then, the paper introduces several prosody-related research works, which are going on in our laboratory. They include, corpus-based fundamental frequency contour generation, speech rate control for dialogue-like speech synthesis, analysis of prosodic features of emotional speech, reply speech generation in spoken dialogue systems, and language modeling with prosodic boundaries.

• Speech Sciences
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• v.7 no.4
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• pp.219-234
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• 2000

The study of boundary tones in connected speech or dialogues is one of the most underdeveloped areas of Korean prosody. This. paper concerns the boundary tones of intonational phrase-final morphemes which are shown in the speech corpus of dialogues. Results of phonetic analysis show that different kinds of boundary tones are realized, depending on the positions of the intonational phrase-final morphemes in the sentences.. This study has also shown that boundary tone patterning is somewhat related to the sentence structure, and for better speech recognition and speech synthesis, it presents a simple model of boundary tones based on the fundamental frequency contour. The results of this study will contribute to our understanding of the prosodic pattern of Korean connected speech or dialogues.