• 한국정보처리학회논문지
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• 제3권5호
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• pp.1121-1129
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• 1996

Text-to-Speech 시스템에서 자연스럽게 음성을 합성하기 위해서는 운율과 길이 에 대한 처리가 선행되어야 한다. 이를 위해서, 자연어 처리에 의해 분석된 문장들에 대해 억양 규칙을 적용한 후, 반복적인 실험을 통해 운율 및 길이 정보를 추출하였다. 본 논문에서는 이러한 정보를 이용하여 Text-to-Speech 시스템에서 자연성을 향상 시 킬 수 있는 방법을 제안한다. 실험 결과, 본 논문에서 제안하고 구현한 무제한 Text- to-Speech 시스템이 이러한 정보들을 사용하지 않는 시스템과 비교해서 더 자연스럽게 문장들을 합성해 낸다는 것을 보였다.

• 음성과학
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• 제15권4호
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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.

• 말소리와 음성과학
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• 제10권1호
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• pp.39-48
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• 2018

A typical statistical parametric speech synthesis (text-to-speech, TTS) system consists of separate modules, such as a text analysis module, an acoustic modeling module, and a speech synthesis module. This causes two problems: 1) expert knowledge of each module is required, and 2) errors generated in each module accumulate passing through each module. An end-to-end TTS system could avoid such problems by synthesizing voice signals directly from an input string. In this study, we implemented an end-to-end Korean TTS system using Google's Tacotron, which is an end-to-end TTS system based on a sequence-to-sequence model with attention mechanism. We used 4392 utterances spoken by a Korean female speaker, an amount that corresponds to 37% of the dataset Google used for training Tacotron. Our system obtained mean opinion score (MOS) 2.98 and degradation mean opinion score (DMOS) 3.25. We will discuss the factors which affected training of the system. Experiments demonstrate that the post-processing network needs to be designed considering output language and input characters and that according to the amount of training data, the maximum value of n for n-grams modeled by the encoder should be small enough.

• 음성과학
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• 제10권4호
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• pp.167-177
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• 2003

This paper presents a method of building an exceptional pronunciation dictionary for Korean automatic pronunciation generator. An automatic pronunciation generator is an essential element of speech recognition system and a TTS (Text-To-Speech) system. It is composed of a part of regular rules and an exceptional pronunciation dictionary. The exceptional pronunciation dictionary is created by extracting the words which have exceptional pronunciations from text corpus based on the characteristics of the words of exceptional pronunciation through phonological research and text analysis. Thus, the method contributes to improve performance of Korean automatic pronunciation generator as well as the performance of speech recognition system and TTS system.

• 한국정보처리학회:학술대회논문집
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• 한국정보처리학회 2009년도 추계학술발표대회
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• pp.239-240
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• 2009

We live in a flat world in which globalization fosters communication, travel, and trade among more than 150 countries and thousands of languages. To surmount the barriers among these languages, translation is required; Speech-to-Speech translation will automate the process. Thanks to recent advances in Automatic Speech Recognition (ASR), Machine Translation (MT), and Text-to-Speech (TTS), one can now utilize a system to translate a speech of source language to a speech of target language and vice versa in affordable manner. The three phase process establishes that the source speech be transcribed into a (set of) text of the source language (ASR) before the source text is translated into the target text (MT). Finally, the target speech is synthesized from the target text (TTS).

• 음성과학
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• 제14권4호
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• pp.169-178
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• 2007

This thesis describes the development of a service system for small-sized shops which support not only music broadcasting, but editing and generating voice announcement using the TTS(Text-To-Speech) technology. The system has been developed based on web environments with an easy access whenever and wherever it is needed. The system is able to control the sound using silverlight media player based on the ASP .NET 2.0 technology without any additional application software. Use of the Ajax control allows for multiple users to get the maximum load when needed. TTS is built in the server side so that the service can be provided without user's computer. Due to convenience and usefulness of the system, the business sector can provide better service to many shops. Further additional functions such as statistical analysis will undoubtedly help shop management provide desirable services.

• 한국정보컨버전스학회:학술대회논문집
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• 한국정보컨버전스학회 2008년도 International conference on information convergence
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• pp.53-56
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• 2008

This paper reports on the ACQA(Animated agent for Conversational Question Answering) project conducted at LIMSI. The aim is to design an expressive animated conversational agent(ACA) for conducting research along two main lines: 1/ perceptual experiments(eg perception of expressivity and 3D movements in both audio and visual channels): 2/ design of human-computer interfaces requiring head models at different resolutions and the integration of the talking head in virtual scenes. The target application of this expressive ACA is a real-time question and answer speech based system developed at LIMSI(RITEL). The architecture of the system is based on distributed modules exchanging messages through a network protocol. The main components of the system are: RITEL a question and answer system searching raw text, which is able to produce a text(the answer) and attitudinal information; this attitudinal information is then processed for delivering expressive tags; the text is converted into phoneme, viseme, and prosodic descriptions. Audio speech is generated by the LIMSI selection-concatenation text-to-speech engine. Visual speech is using MPEG4 keypoint-based animation, and is rendered in real-time by Virtual Choreographer (VirChor), a GPU-based 3D engine. Finally, visual and audio speech is played in a 3D audio and visual scene. The project also puts a lot of effort for realistic visual and audio 3D rendering. A new model of phoneme-dependant human radiation patterns is included in the speech synthesis system, so that the ACA can move in the virtual scene with realistic 3D visual and audio rendering.

• 대한음성학회지:말소리
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• 제53호
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• pp.75-92
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• 2005

Prosody Generation Based on C-ToBI Representation for Text-to-SpeechSeungwon Kim, Yu Zheng, Gary Geunbae Lee, Byeongchang KimProsody modeling is critical in developing text-to-speech (TTS) systems where speech synthesis is used to automatically generate natural speech. In this paper, we present a prosody generation architecture based on Chinese Tone and Break Index (C-ToBI) representation. ToBI is a multi-tier representation system based on linguistic knowledge to transcribe events in an utterance. The TTS system which adopts ToBI as an intermediate representation is known to exhibit higher flexibility, modularity and domain/task portability compared with the direct prosody generation TTS systems. However, the cost of corpus preparation is very expensive for practical-level performance because the ToBI labeled corpus has been manually constructed by many prosody experts and normally requires a large amount of data for accurate statistical prosody modeling. This paper proposes a new method which transcribes the C-ToBI labels automatically in Chinese speech. We model Chinese prosody generation as a classification problem and apply conditional Maximum Entropy (ME) classification to this problem. We empirically verify the usefulness of various natural language and phonology features to make well-integrated features for ME framework.

• 대한전자공학회:학술대회논문집
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• 대한전자공학회 2001년도 하계종합학술대회 논문집(3)
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• pp.5-8
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• 2001

The computer programs based upon graphic user interface(GUI) became commonplace with the advance of computer technology. Nevertheless, programs for the visually-handicapped have still remained at the level of TTS(text to speech) programs and this prevents many visually-handicapped from enjoying the pleasure and convenience of the information age. This paper is, paying attention to the importance of character recognition in images, about the configuration of the system that converts text in the image selected by a user to the speech by extracting the character part, and carrying out character recognition.

• 한국음향학회:학술대회논문집
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• 한국음향학회 1994년도 FIFTH WESTERN PACIFIC REGIONAL ACOUSTICS CONFERENCE SEOUL KOREA
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• pp.937-942
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• 1994

Text-to-Speech(TTS) conversion system can convert any words or sentences into speech. To synthesize the speech like human beings do, careful prosody control including intonation, duration, accent, and pause is required. It helps listeners to understand the speech clearly and makes the speech sound more natural. In this paper, a prosody control scheme which makes use of the information of the function word is proposed. Among many factors of prosody, intonation, duration, and pause are closely related to syntactic structure, and their relations have been formalized and embodied in TTS. To evaluate the synthesized speech with the proposed prosody control, one of the subjective evaluation methods-MOS(Mean Opinion Score) method has been used. Synthesized speech has been tested on 10 listeners and each listener scored the speech between 1 and 5. Through the evaluation experiments, it is observed that the proposed prosody control helps TTS system synthesize the more natural speech.