• Phonetics and Speech Sciences
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• v.9 no.4
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• pp.91-97
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• 2017

This study categorizes several voice characteristics by subjective listening assessment, and investigates correlation between voice characteristics and speech feature parameters. A model was developed to classify voice characteristics into the defined categories using SVM algorithm. To do this, we extracted various speech feature parameters from speech database for men in their 20s, and derived statistically significant parameters correlated with voice characteristics through ANOVA analysis. Then, these derived parameters were applied to the proposed SVM model. The experimental results showed that it is possible to obtain some speech feature parameters significantly correlated with the voice characteristics, and that the proposed model achieves the classification accuracies of 88.5% on average.

• The Journal of Advanced Prosthodontics
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• v.2 no.3
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• pp.71-76
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• 2010

PURPOSE. The purpose of this study was to compare men with women in terms of speech intelligibility, to investigate the validity of objective acoustic parameters related with speech intelligibility, and to try to set up the standard data for the future study in various field in prosthodontics. MATERIALS AND METHODS. Twenty men and women were served as subjects in the present study. After recording of sample sounds, speech intelligibility tests by three speech pathologists and acoustic analyses were performed. Comparison of the speech intelligibility test scores and acoustic parameters such as fundamental frequency, fundamental frequency range, formant frequency, formant ranges, vowel working space area, and vowel dispersion were done between men and women. In addition, the correlations between the speech intelligibility values and acoustic variables were analyzed. RESULTS. Women showed significantly higher speech intelligibility scores than men and there were significant difference between men and women in most of acoustic parameters used in the present study. However, the correlations between the speech intelligibility scores and acoustic parameters were low. CONCLUSION. Speech intelligibility test and acoustic parameters used in the present study were effective in differentiating male voice from female voice and their values might be used in the future studies related patients involved with maxillofacial prosthodontics. However, further studies are needed on the correlation between speech intelligibility tests and objective acoustic parameters.

• Speech Sciences
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• v.15 no.4
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• pp.97-105
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• 2008

Nowadays an HMM-based text-to-speech system (HTS) has been very widely studied because it needs less memory and low computation complexity and is suitable for embedded systems in comparison with a corpus-based unit concatenation text-to-speech one. It also has the advantage that voice characteristics and the speaking rate of the synthetic speech can be converted easily by modifying HMM parameters appropriately. We implemented an HMM-based Korean text-to-speech system using a small size Korean speech DB and proposes a method to increase the naturalness of the synthetic speech by controlling duration model parameters in the HMM-based Korean text-to speech system. We performed a paired comparison test to verify that theses techniques are effective. The test result with the preference scores of 73.8% has shown the improvement of the naturalness of the synthetic speech through controlling the duration model parameters.

• Phonetics and Speech Sciences
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• v.3 no.3
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• pp.19-26
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• 2011

Previous laboratory studies have shown that prosodic structures are encoded in the modulations of phonetic patterns of speech including suprasegmental as well as segmental features. Drawing on a prosodically annotated large-scale speech data from the Buckeye corpus of conversational speech of American English, the current study first evaluated the reliability of prosody annotation by a large number of ordinary listeners and later examined whether and how prosodic prominence influences the phonetic realization of multiple acoustic parameters in everyday conversational speech. The results showed that all the measures of acoustic parameters including pitch, loudness, duration, and spectral balance are increased when heard as prominent. These findings suggest that prosodic prominence enhances the phonetic characteristics of the acoustic parameters. The results also showed that the degree of phonetic enhancement vary depending on the types of the acoustic parameters. With respect to the formant structure, the findings from the present study more consistently support Sonority Expansion Hypothesis than Hyperarticulation Hypothesis, showing that the lexically stressed vowels are hyperarticulated only when hyperarticulation does not interfere with sonority expansion. Taken all into account, the present study showed that prosodic prominence modulates the phonetic realization of the acoustic parameters to the direction of the phonetic strengthening in everyday conversational speech and ordinary listeners are attentive to such phonetic variation associated with prosody in speech perception. However, the present study also showed that in everyday conversational speech there is no single dominant acoustic measure signaling prosodic prominence and listeners must attend to such small acoustic variation or integrate acoustic information from multiple acoustic parameters in prosody perception.

• Journal of Institute of Control, Robotics and Systems
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• v.16 no.12
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• pp.1137-1142
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• 2010

This paper studied the speech parameters less affected by the human emotion for the development of the robust speech recognition system. For this purpose, the effect of emotion on the speech recognition system and robust speech parameters of speech recognition system were studied using speech database containing various emotions. In this study, mel-cepstral coefficient, delta-cepstral coefficient, RASTA mel-cepstral coefficient and frequency warped mel-cepstral coefficient were used as feature parameters. And CMS (Cepstral Mean Subtraction) method were used as a signal bias removal technique. Experimental results showed that the HMM based speaker independent word recognizer using vocal tract length normalized mel-cepstral coefficient, its derivatives and CMS as a signal bias removal showed the best performance of 0.78% word error rate. This corresponds to about a 50% word error reduction as compare to the performance of baseline system using mel-cepstral coefficient, its derivatives and CMS.

• The Journal of the Acoustical Society of Korea
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• v.17 no.1E
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• pp.10-13
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• 1998

We propose a robust non-speech rejection algorithm using the three types of pitch-related parameters. The robust non-speech rejection algorithm utilizes three kinds of pitch parameters : (1) pitch range, (2) difference of the successive pitch range, and (3) the number of successive pitches satisfying constraints related with the previous two parameters. The acceptance rate of the speech commands was 95% for -2.8dB signal-to-noise ratio (SNR) speech database that consisted of 2440 utterances. The rejection rate of the non-speech sounds was 100% while the acceptance rate of the speech commands was 97% in an office environment.

• Phonetics and Speech Sciences
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• v.8 no.2
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• pp.17-22
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• 2016

This paper devises a model to diagnose physical fatigue using speech features. This paper presents a machine learning method through an SVM algorithm using the various feature parameters. The parameters used include the significant speech parameters, questionnaire responses, and bio-signal parameters obtained before and after the experiment imposing the fatigue. The results showed that performance rates of 95%, 100%, and 90%, respectively, were observed from the proposed model using three types of the parameters relevant to the fatigue. These results suggest that the method proposed in this study can be used as the physical fatigue diagnostic model, and that fatigue can be easily diagnosed by speech technology.

• Proceedings of the Acoustical Society of Korea Conference
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• 1998.08a
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• pp.250-253
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• 1998

In digital communicatioin networks, speech recognition systems conventionally reconstruct speech followed by extracting feature [parameters. In this paper, we consider a useful approach by incorporating speech coding parameters into the speech recognizer. Most speech coders employed in the networks represent line spectral pairs as spectral parameters. In order to improve the recognition performance of the LSP-based speech recognizer, we introduce two different ways: one is to devise weighed distance measures of LSPs and the other is to transform LSPs into a new feature set, named a pseudo-cepstrum. Experiments on speaker-independent connected-digit recognition showed that the weighted distance measures significantly improved the recognition accuracy than the unweighted one of LSPs. Especially we could obtain more improved performance by using PCEP. Compared to the conventional methods employing mel-frequency cepstral coefficients, the proposed methods achieved higher performance in recognition accuracies.

• MALSORI
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• no.45
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• pp.107-115
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• 2003

An efficient method that compensates the HMM parameters for the noisy speech recognition is proposed. Instead of assuming some analytical approximations as in the PMC, the proposed method directly re-estimates the HMM parameters by the segmental k-means algorithm. The proposed method has shown improved results compared with the conventional PMC method at reduced computational cost.

• Proceedings of the KSPS conference
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• 2002.11a
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• pp.115-118
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• 2002

Neural networks have been known to have great discriminative power in pattern classification problems. In this paper, the multilayer perceptron neural networks are employed to automatically detect laryngeal pathology in speech. Also new feature parameters are introduced which can reflect the periodicity of speech and its perturbation. These parameters and cepstral coefficients are used as input of the multilayer perceptron neural networks. According to the experiment using Korean disordered speech database, incorporation of new parameters with cepstral coefficients outperforms the case with only cepstral coefficients.