• Phonetics and Speech Sciences
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• v.5 no.4
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• pp.145-155
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• 2013

This study investigated the articulatory characteristics of Korean singleton and geminate sonorants in the word-medial position, effects of the duration of the sonorant consonant and the preceding vowel on perception, and the difference between native Korean speakers and foreign learners of Korean in perceiving the singleton and geminate consonant contrast. The Korean sonorant consonants(/m, n, l/) are examined from the VCCV, VCV sequences through speech production and perception experiments. The results suggest that the duration of the sonorant consonant is the most important factor for native Korean speakers to recognize whether sonorants are overlapped, and the duration of preceding vowel and other factors affect the recognition of singleton/geminate consonant contrast if the duration is not obvious. A perception experiment showed Chinese Korean language learners did not clearly distinguish singleton consonants from geminate consonants. The results of this study provide basic data for recognition of singleton/geminate consonant contrast in word-medial of Korean language, and can be utilized for teaching Korean pronunciation as a foreign language.

• Proceedings of the KSPS conference
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• 2007.05a
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• pp.227-229
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• 2007

We investigate whether the word frequency effects occur in native speakers' homophone speech in such a way that less frequent words are produced with greater magnitudes in duration and F0 than more frequent words. Acoustic analyses of homophone data produced by four speakers reveal that there is a tendency that vowels in less frequent words get longer than those in more frequent words, and statistical tests verify the significance of their differences. On the other hand, no considerable correlation has been discovered between F0 and word frequency.

• Speech Sciences
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• v.11 no.4
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• pp.43-52
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• 2004

Model parameters in HMM based speech recognition systems are normally estimated using Maximum Likelihood Estimation(MLE). The MLE method is based mainly on the principle of statistical data fitting in terms of increasing the HMM likelihood. The optimality of this training criterion is conditioned on the availability of infinite amount of training data and the correct choice of model. However, in practice, neither of these conditions is satisfied. In this paper, we propose a training algorithm, MCE(Minimum Classification Error), to improve the performance of a speech recognizer detecting mispronunciation of a foreign language. During the conventional MLE(Maximum Likelihood Estimation) training, the model parameters are adjusted to increase the likelihood of the word strings corresponding to the training utterances without taking account of the probability of other possible word strings. In contrast to MLE, the MCE training scheme takes account of possible competing word hypotheses and tries to reduce the probability of incorrect hypotheses. The discriminant training method using MCE shows better recognition results than the MLE method does.

• Korea Journal of Hospital Management
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• v.18 no.4
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• pp.1-17
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• 2013

This research tried to understand the expectation and experience level of the medical service among the foreign patients who visit South Korea for a medical tourism, and to find out the effect of expectation and experience level on the satisfaction of medical service. Data collection was done through conducting a survey of inpatients in 4 hospitals located in Seoul, Korea. Total 110 cases were used for analysis. According to the study, expectation level had a significant difference between the group exposed to a word-of-mouth and the group not exposed to the word-of-mouth. The difference analysis of expectation and experience level of the foreign patients showed that all components of the service quality were satisfied. The component of perceived reliability was the only factor influencing the foreign patients' overall satisfaction on the medical service. The findings of this study will be provided a basic data for the marketing strategy which can apply to the satisfaction strategy differentiated from other countries.

• Journal of the Korean Professional Engineers Association
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• v.30 no.5
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• pp.42-55
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• 1997

• Phonetics and Speech Sciences
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• v.8 no.1
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• pp.45-51
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• 2016

This study examined the deletion of onset consonant in the word-internal structure in spontaneous Seoul Korean speech. It used the dataset of speakers in their 20s extracted from the Korean Corpus of Spontaneous Speech (Yun et al., 2015). The proportion of deletion of word-internal onset consonants was analyzed using the linear mixed-effects regression model. The factors that promoted the deletion of onsets were primarily the types of consonants and their phonetic contexts. The results showed that onset deletion was more likely to occur for a lenis velar stop [k] than the other consonants, and in the phonetic contexts, when the preceding vowel was a low central vowel [a]. Moreover, some speakers tended to more frequently delete onset consonants (e.g., [k] and [n]) than other speakers, which reflected individual differences. This study implies that word-internal onsets undergo a process of gradient reduction within individuals' articulatory strategies.

• Cross-Cultural Studies
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• v.33
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• pp.359-384
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• 2013

There is linguistic phenomenon that Korean syllable, morpheme and word are substituted with Chinese Character. These phenomenon is called Chinese Character Borrowing, the Chinese character used here is called Borrowed Chinese Character. Whereas borrowing Chinese character in Chinese is used for borrowing only sound for different word, borrowing Chinese character in Korean is used for assigning new meaning. Hence, by borrowing Chinese character in Korean, a syllable which had no meaning originally get new meaning, morpheme and word meaning has changed. At advertisement and campaign, Chinese Character Borrowing has lots of linguistical advantage such as visual immediacy, effectiveness of meaning expression. However, there are number of cases found that violate grammar rule and word constitution practice by Chinese Character Borrowing. For this reason, Chinese Character Borrowing has the problem polluting Korean along with another foreign words. Thus, this paper focus on study Chinese Character Borrowing phenomenon in Korean, and analysis its effectiveness and impact in Korean. In addition, analysis the problem of Borrowed chinese Character, and suggestion several alternative for right use of Korean is followed.

• Language and Information
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• v.12 no.1
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• pp.27-65
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• 2008

This paper presents a set of methodologies for aligning hypernym-hyponym noun pairs between Korean and English, based on the EuroWordNet approach. Following the methods conducted in EuroWordNet, our approach makes extensive use of WordNet in four steps of the building process: 1) Monolingual dictionaries have been used to extract proper hypernym-hyponym noun pairs, 2) bilingual dictionary has converted the extracted pairs, 3) Word Net has been used as a backbone of alignment criteria, and 4) WordNet has been used to select the most similar pair among the candidates. The importance of this study lies not only on enriching semantic links between two languages, but also on integrating lexical resources based on a language specific and dependent structure. Our approaches are aimed at building an accurate and detailed lexical resource with proper measures rather than at fast development of generic one using NLP technique.

• English Language & Literature Teaching
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• v.17 no.3
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• pp.273-290
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• 2011

This paper presents a case study involving one Korean primary school student and people around him in order to explore the reading process in English of a young Korean EFL learner and to investigate the social context in which his reading takes place. Six participants were included in the study (one primary school student and five adult participants). The student participant was asked to read a text in English and translate what he read into Korean and the teacher participants were asked to listen to the student's reading. Semi-structured interview was used to collect data from the student as well as five adult participants (his private tutor, his parent, his state school teacher, and two other state school teachers). The analysis reveals four characteristics of the way a young EFL learner approaches reading: word-by-word reading, disconnected word recognition, selective use of cues, and lack of awareness of difficulties. The four characteristics of Kilsu's reading suggest that reading can become a wild guessing game for young foreign learners, if they give selective attention to unimportant cues while reading. The pedagogical implications of this study are also discussed to help teachers designing reading lessons for young learners.

• Journal of Information Technology Services
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• v.17 no.2
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• pp.129-142
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• 2018

Recently, the number of patent applications have been increasing rapidly every year as the importance of protecting intellectual property rights becomes more important. Patents must be inventive and have novelty. Especially, the novelty implies that the corresponding invention is not the same as the previous invention. To confirm the novelty, prior art search must be conducted before and after the application. The target of prior art search should include not only Korean patents but also foreign patents. Search of foreign patents should be supported by multilingual search techniques. However, a dictionary-based naive approach shows a limitation because some technical concepts are represented in different terms according to each nation. For example, a Korean term and a Japanese term may not be synonym even though they represent the same technical concept. In this paper, we propose a new method to map semantic similarity between technical terms in Korean patents and Japanese patents. To investigate different representations in each nation for the same technical concept, we identified and analyzed pairs of patents those are mutually connected with priority claim relationship. By performing an experiment with real-world data, we showed that our approach can reveal semantically similar technical terms in other language successfully.