• MALSORI
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• no.62
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• pp.69-84
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• 2007

Japanese is a language having intonations, which are indicated by the relative differences in pitch heights and the accentual phrases (APs) are placed according to the changes of the accents while a break occurs on a boundary of the APs. Although a break can be predicted by using J-ToBI, which is a rule-based or statistical approach, it is very difficult to predict a break exactly due to the flexibility. Therefore, in this paper, a method which can enhance the quality of synthesized speech by reducing the errors in predicting break indices (BI), are proposed. The method is to use a new definition for the phonetic symbols, which combine the phonetic values of Japanese words with the accents information. Since a stream of defined phonetic symbols includes the information on the changes in intonations, the BI can be easily predicted by dividing the intonation phrase (IP) into several APs. As a result of an experiment, the accuracy of break generations was 98 % and the proposed method contributed itself to enhance the naturalness of synthesized speeches.

• Proceedings of the IEEK Conference
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• 2002.07a
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• pp.504-507
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• 2002

In this paper, we proposed the formation of Hangul-International Phonetic Alphabet conversion table that also meets the standard Korean pronunciation rule. In Hangul, due to a phonetic value change phenomenon, notation and pronunciation are different. To do this, conversion table of notation-phonetic value is created, and conversion table of phonetic value-International Phonetic Alphabet notation are formed. As a result, the conversion table of International Phonetic Alphabet notation that accords with the standard Korean pronunciation has been formed, and it is proved by experiments that the result of conversion has no faults.

• The Transactions of the Korea Information Processing Society
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• v.7 no.6
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• pp.1964-1972
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• 2000

For the Korean language, on acoustics, it creates a different form of phonetic value not a phoneme by its own peculiar property. Therefore, the construction of extended recognition system for understanding Korean language should be created with a study of the Korean rule-based system, before it can be used as post-processing of the Korean recognition system. In this paper, text-based Korean rule-based system featuring Korean peculiar vocal sound changing rule is constructed. and based on the text-based phonetic value result of the system constructed, a preliminary phonetic value segmentation border points with non-uniform blocks are extracted in Korean isolated word speech. Through the way of merge and recognition of the non-uniform blocks between the extracted border points, recognition possibility of Korean voice as the form of the phonetic vale has been investigated.

• Proceedings of the KSPS conference
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• 2005.04a
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• pp.29-33
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• 2005

This study aims to establish a speech corpus for Korean as a foreign language (L2 Korean Speech Corpus, L2KSC) and to examine the aspects of the foreign learners acquisition of the phonetic and phonological systems in the Korean Language. In the first year of this project, L2KSC will be established through the process of reading list organizing, recording, and slicing, and the second year includes an in-depth study of the aspects of foreign learners Korean acquisition and a contrastive analysis of phonetic and phonological systems. The expectation is that this project will provide significant bases for a variety of fields such as Korean education, academic research, and technological development of phonetic information.

• 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.

• Phonetics and Speech Sciences
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• v.15 no.3
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• pp.1-7
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• 2023

This study investigates how the phonological and phonetic information of vowels influences prosodic prominence among linguistically untrained listeners using public speech in American English. We first examined the speech material's phonetic realization of vowels (i.e., maximum F0, F0 range, phone rate [as a measure of duration considering the speech rate of the utterance], and mean intensity). Results showed that the high vowels /i/ and /u/ likely had the highest max F0, while the low vowels /æ/ and /ɑ/ tended to have the highest mean intensity. Both high and low vowels had similarly high phone rates. Next, we examined the effects of the vowels' phonological and phonetic information on listeners' perceptions of prosodic prominence. The results showed that vowels significantly affected the likelihood of perceived prominence independent of acoustic cues. The high and low vowels affected probability of perceived prominence less than the mid vowels /ɛ/ and /ʌ/, although the former two were more likely to be phonetically enhanced in the speech than the latter. Overall, these results suggest that perceptions of prosodic prominence in English are not directly influenced by signal-driven factors (i.e., vowels' acoustic information) but are mediated by expectation-driven factors (e.g., vowels' phonological information).

• Speech Sciences
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• v.15 no.2
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• pp.7-19
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• 2008

Information structure can be conveyed by prosodic structure (Poser 1984 for Japanese; Inkelas and Leben 1990 for Hausa; Cho 1990 for Korean; Hayes and Lahiri 1991 for Bengali; Selkirk and Shen 1990 for Shanghai Chinese). Different subfields of linguistics and different theoretical perspectives suggest many distinct types of information structure: topic vs. comment, focus vs. background. old vs. new information, etc. The purpose of this paper is to investigate phonetic realizations of focus and topic among these information structures in Korean. For this purpose, we conduct a phonetic experiment where we examine duration, pitch and dephrasing in focus and topic structures. We make four findings through this study. First, duration of 'nun' varies depending on the information structure of the following constituent. Second, the degree of accentual phrase-initial rising is larger in contrastive topic and focused phrases than in neutral phrases. Third, a contrastive topic phrase always constitutes an Intonation Phrase on its own. Fourth, dephrasing occurs variously depending on gender and the number of the syllables within a phrase.

• Proceedings of the Acoustical Society of Korea Conference
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• 1994.06c
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• pp.205-209
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• 1994

This paper presents a variable rate speech coding method with phonetic segmentation, called for PSVXC. Multiple access techniques that require efficient encoding of speech to achieve capacity improvements are currently emerging in the cellular telephone system. The variable rate speech coder have the reduced average data rate required to transmit conversational speech. Each frame of active speech is classified into one of four phonetic classes. A distinct coding configuration and bit-rate is applied to each category. And also a split vector quantization is used to accurately quantize the LPC information using LSP parameters.

• Proceedings of the KSPS conference
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• 2006.05a
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• pp.37-40
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• 2006

In this paper, we propose a VQ codebook design of speech recognition feature parameters in order to improve the performance of a distributed speech recognition system. For the context-dependent HMMs, a VQ codebook should be correlated with phonetic distributions in the training data for HMMs. Thus, we focus on a selection method of training data based on phonetic distribution instead of using all the training data for an efficient VQ codebook design. From the speech recognition experiments using the Aurora 4 database, the distributed speech recognition system employing a VQ codebook designed by the proposed method reduced the word error rate (WER) by 10% when compared with that using a VQ codebook trained with the whole training data.

• Phonetics and Speech Sciences
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• v.1 no.3
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• pp.103-108
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• 2009

This paper proposes a method for building a transliteration dictionary, which is based on pronouncing information extracted from two kinds of existing dictionaries. Also, it proposes a method for transforming the pronouncing information into Korean translitered words. To express the pronouncing information, we define Phoman code system. In order to avoid phonetic estimation process of English words which is the most important problem, the proposed method uses the pronouncing information extracted from the existing dictionaries. Therefore, unlike previous approaches, the proposed method does not need any incomplete phonetic estimation process so that it can produce accurate transliteration results. The proposed method has been fully implemented.