• 대한음성학회:학술대회논문집
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• 대한음성학회 1996년도 10월 학술대회지
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• pp.542-547
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• 1996

Prosodic characteristics of natural speech, especially intonation, in many cases represent specific feelings of the speaker at the time of the utterance, with relatively vast variations of speaking styles over the same text. We analyzed a collected speech corpus, recorded with ten Slovene speakers. Interpretation of observed intonation contours was done for the purpose of modelling the intonation contour in synthesis process. We devised a scheme for modeling the intonation contour for different types of intonation units based on the results of analyzing intonation contours. The intonation scheme uses a superpositional approach, which defines the intonation contour as the sum of global (intonation unit) and local (accented syllables or syntactic boundaries) components. Near-to-natural intonation contour was obtained by rules, using only the text of the utterance as input.

• 음성과학
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• 제7권2호
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• pp.193-208
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• 2000

This paper describes a multi-step method of intonation modeling for corpus-based Korean speech synthesizer. We selected 1833 sentences considering various syntactic structures and built a corresponding speech corpus uttered by a female announcer. We detected the pitch using laryngograph signals and manually marked the prosodic boundaries on recorded speech, and carried out the tagging of part-of-speech and syntactic analysis on the text. The detected pitch was separated into 3 frequency bands of low, mid, high frequency components which correspond to the baseline, the word tone, and the syllable tone. We predicted them using the CART method and the Viterbi search algorithm with a word-tone-dictionary. In the collected spoken sentences, 1500 sentences were trained and 333 sentences were tested. In the layer of word tone modeling, we compared two methods. One is to predict the word tone corresponding to the mid-frequency components directly and the other is to predict it by multiplying the ratio of the word tone to the baseline by the baseline. The former method resulted in a mean error of 12.37 Hz and the latter in one of 12.41 Hz, similar to each other. In the layer of syllable tone modeling, it resulted in a mean error rate less than 8.3% comparing with the mean pitch, 193.56 Hz of the announcer, so its performance was relatively good.

• 말소리와 음성과학
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• 제1권1호
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• pp.9-22
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• 2009

This paper first presents the author's personal view on the importance of modeling in scientific research in general, and then describes two of his works toward modeling certain aspects of human speech communication. The first work is concerned with the physiological and physical mechanisms of controlling the voice fundamental frequency of speech, which is an important parameter for expressing information on tone, accent, and intonation. The second work is concerned with the cognitive processes involved in a discrimination test of speech stimuli, which gives rise to the phenomenon of so-called categorical perception. They are meant to illustrate the power of models based on deep understanding and precise formulation of the functions of the mechanisms/processes that underlie observed phenomena. Finally, it also presents the author's view on some models that are yet to be developed.

• 한국언어정보학회:학술대회논문집
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• 한국언어정보학회 2007년도 정기학술대회
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• pp.405-414
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• 2007

This paper describes a preliminary work on prosody modeling aspect of a text-to-speech system for Thai. Specifically, the model is designed to predict symbolic markers from text (i.e., prosodic phrase boundaries, accent, and intonation boundaries), and then using these markers to generate pitch, intensity, and durational patterns for the synthesis module of the system. In this paper, a novel method for annotating the prosodic structure of Thai sentences based on dependency representation of syntax is presented. The goal of the annotation process is to predict from text the rhythm of the input sentence when spoken according to its intended meaning. The encoding of the prosodic structure is established by minimizing speech disrhythmy while maintaining the congruency with syntax. That is, each word in the sentence is assigned a prosodic feature called strength dynamic which is based on the dependency representation of syntax. The strength dynamics assigned are then used to obtain rhythmic groupings in terms of a phonological unit called foot. Finally, the foot structure is used to predict the durational pattern of the input sentence. The aforementioned process has been tested on a set of ambiguous sentences, which represents various structural ambiguities involving five types of compounds in Thai.

• 한국산학기술학회논문지
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• 제14권8호
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• pp.3992-3998
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• 2013

본 논문은 고음질의 대용량 코퍼스 기반 음성 합성기에 감정 음성 코퍼스를 추가하여 보다 다양한 합성음을 생성할 수 있는 방법에 관한 것이다. 파형 접합형 합성기에서 사용할 수 있는 형태로 감정 음성 코퍼스를 구축하여 기존의 일반 음성 코퍼스와 동일한 합성단위 선택과정을 통해 합성음을 생성할 수 있도록 구현하였다. 감정 음성 합성을 위해 태그를 사용하여 텍스트를 입력하고, 억양구 단위로 일치하는 데이터가 존재하는 경우 감정 음성으로 합성하고, 그렇지 않은 경우 일반 음성으로 합성하도록 하였다. 그리고 음성에서 운율을 구성하는 요소로 휴지기(break)가 있는데, 감정 음성의 휴지기는 일반 음성보다 불규칙한 특성이 있다. 따라서 합성기에서 생성되는 휴지기 정보를 감정 음성 합성에 그대로 사용하는 것이 어려워진다. 이 문제를 해결하기 위해 가변 휴지기(Variable break)[3] 모델링을 적용하였다. 실험은 일본어 합성기를 사용하였고, 그 결과 일반 음성의 휴지기 예측 모듈을 그대로 사용하면서 자연스러운 감정 합성음을 얻을 수 있었다.