• MALSORI
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• no.33_34
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• pp.111-125
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• 1997

This experimental phonetic analysis aims to describe standard Korean simple vowels with a view to presenting the vowel quality change from generation to generation, especially between the 50's and the 20's. This change reflects that the contemporary vowel system has both stable and unstable aspect: the former can be affirmed in the vowels with extreme positions in the vowel quadrilateral. and the latter in some vowels(e.g.,'ㅔ/ㅐ') which have the non-quantal vowel characteristics in the current vowel system. Formant values are measured to show these. And the results of acoustic analysis are presented graphically in the vowel quadrilateral for the convenience' sake. The comparison between the articulatory vowel quadrilateral and the acoustic one shows a lot concerning the current vowel quality change.

• Cross-Cultural Studies
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• v.25
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• pp.723-741
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• 2011

The principle of vowel dispersion claims that vowels are dispersed in the available phonetic space. However, SPAP and UPSID show that deviations from the patterns predicted by this principle are relatively infrequent of, for the most part, confined to matters of small scale, falling into a few definable classes. In this paper, we will discuss the vowel systems of 4 languages, Korean, English, Japanese, and Chinese, and will argue that vowels tend toward a balanced and wide dispersion in the available phonetic space by the complementary vowels.

• Journal of the Institute of Convergence Signal Processing
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• v.4 no.4
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• pp.30-39
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• 2003

In this paper, we carried out the performance evaluation of HM-Net(Hidden Markov Network) speech recognition system for Korean speech databases. We adopted to construct acoustic models using the HM-Nets modified by HMMs(Hidden Markov Models), which are widely used as the statistical modeling methods. HM-Nets are carried out the state splitting for contextual and temporal domain by PDT-SSS(Phonetic Decision Tree-based Successive State Splitting) algorithm, which is modified the original SSS algorithm. Especially it adopted the phonetic decision tree to effectively express the context information not appear in training speech data on contextual domain state splitting. In case of temporal domain state splitting, to effectively represent information of each phoneme maintenance in the state splitting is carried out, and then the optimal model network of triphone types are constructed by in the parameter. Speech recognition was performed using the one-pass Viterbi beam search algorithm with phone-pair/word-pair grammar for phoneme/word recognition, respectively and using the multi-pass search algorithm with n-gram language models for sentence recognition. The tree-structured lexicon was used in order to decrease the number of nodes by sharing the same prefixes among words. In this paper, the performance evaluation of HM-Net speech recognition system is carried out for various recognition conditions. Through the experiments, we verified that it has very superior recognition performance compared with the previous introduced recognition system.

• Proceedings of the Korean Society for Language and Information Conference
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• 1998.02a
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• pp.283-294
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• 1998

• The Journal of the Acoustical Society of Korea
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• v.31 no.3
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• pp.170-178
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• 2012

In the paper, phonetic decision tree of the triphone unit was built for the phoneme-based speech recognition of 640 stations which run by the Korail. The clustering rate was determined by Pearson and Regression analysis to decide threshold used in node splitting. Using the determined the clustering rate, thresholds are automatically decided by the threshold value according to the average clustering rate. In the recognition experiments for verifying the proposed method, the performance improved 1.4~2.3 % absolutely than that of the baseline system.

• Proceedings of the KSPS conference
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• 1996.02a
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• pp.157-172
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• 1996

This study aims to suggest some theoretical methodology for analysis of the prosodic patterns in Korean Read Speech. The engineering effort relevant to the phonetic study has focused to the importance of prosodic phrasing which may play a major role in analyzing the phonetic DB. Before establishing the prosodic phrase as the prosodic unit, we should describe the features of the boundary signal in a target sentence. With this in mind, the general characteristics of Read Speech and the ToBI(tones and Break Indices), which has been currently in vogue with respect to the prosodic labelling system were presented as the first step. The concrete analysis was carried out with the fable 'North Wind and the Sun' Korean version, where about 25 prosodic units were discriminated by perceptual approach for 5 subjects. Establishing various informations which can be used for deciding a boundary position systematically, we can proceed to the next, viz. acoustic analysis of prosodic unit. The most important which we primarily study for improving the naturalness of synthetic speech may be, at first, detecting the boundary signals in the speech file and accordingly reestablishment it within the raw text.

• Proceedings of the KSPS conference
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• 1996.10a
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• pp.289-293
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• 1996

In Korean, as with Kana and Kanji in Japanese, two kinds of word-writing systems--Hangul (the Korean alphabet) and Hanja (the Chinese character; Kanji in Japanese)--have been and still are being used. Hangul is phonetic while Hanja is ideographic. A phonetic alphabet represents the pronunciation of words, wheras ideographs are where a character of a writing system represents a concept. Aphasics suffer from language disorders following brain damage. The reading and writing of Hangul and Hanja by two Korean Broca's aphasics were analyzed with two goals. The first goal was to confirm the functional autonomy of reading and writing systems in the brain that has been argued by other researchers. The second goal was to reveal what difference the subjects show in reading and writing Hangul and Hanja. As experimental materials, 50 monosyllabic words were chosen in Hangul and Hanja respectively. The 50 word pairs of Hangul and Hanja have the same meaning and are also the most familiar monosyllabic words for a group of normal adults in their fifties and sixties. The errors that the aphasic subjects made in performing the experimental materials are analyzed and discussed here. This analysis has confirmed that reading and writing systems are located in different parts in the brain. Furthemore, it seems clear that the two writing systems of Hangul and Hanja have their own respective processes.

• The Journal of the Acoustical Society of Korea
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• v.19 no.1
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• pp.4-10
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• 2000

The work presented in this paper is about a postprocessor, which improves the performance of automatic speech segmentation system by correcting the phoneme boundary errors. We propose a postprocessor that reduces the range of errors in the auto labeled results that are ready to be used directly as synthesis unit. Starting from a baseline automatic segmentation system, our proposed postprocessor trains the features of hand labeled results using multi-layer perceptron(MLP) algorithm. Then, the auto labeled result combined with MLP postprocessor determines the new phoneme boundary. The details are as following. First, we select the feature sets of speech, based on the acoustic phonetic knowledge. And then we have adopted the MLP as pattern classifier because of its excellent nonlinear discrimination capability. Moreover, it is easy for MLP to reflect fully the various types of acoustic features appearing at the phoneme boundaries within a short time. At the last procedure, an appropriate feature set analyzed about each phonetic event is applied to our proposed postprocessor to compensate the phoneme boundary error. For phonetically rich sentences data, we have achieved 19.9 % improvement for the frame accuracy, comparing with the performance of plain automatic labeling system. Also, we could reduce the absolute error rate about 28.6%.

• Asia Marketing Journal
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• v.12 no.4
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• pp.1-25
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• 2011

Brand names are often considered as a part of product and important extrinsic cues of product evaluation, when consumers make purchasing decisions. For a company, brand names are also important assets. Building a strong brand name in the Chinese commonwealth is a main challenge for many global companies. One of the first problem global company has to face is how to translate English brand name into Chinese brand name. It is very difficult decision because of cultural and linguistic differences. Western languages are based on an alphabet phonetic system, whereas Chinese are based on ideogram. Chinese speakers are more likely to recall stimuli presented as brand names in visual rather than spoken recall, whereas English speakers are more likely to recall the names in spoken rather than in visual recall. We interpret these findings in terms of the fact that mental representations of verbal information in Chinese are coded primarily in a visual manner, whereas verbal information in English is coded by primarily in a phonological manner. A key linguistic differences that would affect the decision to standardize or localize when transferring English brand name to Chinese brand name is the writing system. Prior Chinese brand naming research suggests that popular Chinese naming translations foreign companies adopt are phonetic, semantic, and phonosemantic translation. The phonetic translation refers to the speech sound that is produced, such as the pronunciation of the brand name. The semantic translation involves the actual meaning of and association made with the brand name. The phonosemantic translation preserves the sound of the brand name and brand meaning. Prior brand naming research has dealt with word-level analysis in examining English brand name that are desirable for improving memorability. We predict Chinese brand name suggestiveness with different translation methods lead to different levels of consumers' evaluations. This research investigates the structural linguistic characteristics of the Chinese language and its impact on the brand name evaluation. Otherwise purpose of this study is to examine the effect of brand concept on the evaluation of brand name. We also want to examine whether the evaluation is moderated by Chinese translation types. 178 Taiwanese participants were recruited for the research. The following findings are from the empirical analysis on the hypotheses established in this study. In the functional brand concept, participants in Chinese translation by semantic were likely to evaluate positively than Chinese translation by phonetic. On the contrary, in the symbolic brand concept condition, participants in Chinese translation by phonetic evaluated positively than by semantic. And then, we found Chinese translation by phonosemantic was most favorable evaluations regardless of brand concept. The implications of these findings are discussed for Chinese commonwealth marketers with respect to brand name strategies. The proposed model helps companies to effectively select brand name, making it highly applicable for academia and practitioner. name and brand meaning. Prior brand naming research has dealt with word-level analysis in examining English brand name that are desirable for improving memorability. We predict Chinese brand name suggestiveness with different translation methods lead to different levels of consumers' evaluations. This research investigates the structural linguistic characteristics of the Chinese language and its impact on the brand name evaluation. Otherwise purpose of this study is to examine the effect of brand concept on the evaluation of brand name. We also want to examine whether the evaluation is moderated by Chinese translation types. 178 Taiwanese participants were recruited for the research. The following findings are from the empirical analysis on the hypotheses established in this study. In the functional brand concept, participants in Chinese translation by semantic were likely to evaluate positively than Chinese translation by phonetic. On the contrary, in the symbolic brand concept condition, participants in Chinese translation by phonetic evaluated positively than by semantic. And then, we found Chinese translation by phonosemantic was most favorable evaluations regardless of brand concept. The implications of these findings are discussed for Chinese commonwealth marketers with respect to brand name strategies. The proposed model helps companies to effectively select brand name, making it highly applicable for academia and practitioner.

• MALSORI
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• no.63
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• pp.101-112
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• 2007

Spoken dialog system development includes many laborious and inefficient tasks. Since there are many components such as speech recognition, language understanding, dialog management and knowledge management in a spoken dialog system, a developer should take an effort to edit corpus and train each model separately. To reduce a cost for editing corpus and training each model, we need more systematic and efficient working environment. For the working environment, we propose DialogStudio as a spoken dialog system workbench.