• 대한음성학회지:말소리
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• 제66호
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• pp.117-130
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• 2008

This paper presents a method for automatically detecting Korean prosodic boundaries using both acoustic and grammatical information for the performance improvement of speech information processing systems. While most of previous works are solely based on grammatical information, our method utilizes not only grammatical information constructed by a Maximum-Entropy-based grammar model using 10 grammatical features, but also acoustical information constructed by a GMM-based acoustic model using 14 acoustic features. Given that Korean prosodic structure has two intonationally defined prosodic units, intonation phrase (IP) and accentual phrase (AP), experimental results show that the detection rate of AP boundaries is 82.6%, which is higher than the labeler agreement rate in hand transcribing, and that the detection rate of IP boundaries is 88.7%, which is slightly lower than the labeler agreement rate.

• 음성과학
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• 제11권2호
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• pp.137-150
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• 2004

This paper investigates the prosodic characteristics of discourse boundaries in spontaneous conversation. In this study, the term 'conversation' is taken to refer to a kind of talk in which two or more participants alternate in speaking about particular topics. Such a definition implies that there are at least two sorts of structures in the conversation: textual structure and interactive structure. This requires us to consider not just the textual influences on prosody but also the impact of interactive context. The aim of this study is to find out the acoustic-prosodic means used by speakers to signal discourse boundaries in conversational interaction. The results show that the conflict between the structural level and the interactive level obliges the speakers to reorganize the prosodic variables according to the type of discourse boundaries.

• 한국음향학회지
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• 제18권8호
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• pp.9-16
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• 1999

일반적으로 사람은 말을 할 때 어절들은 몇몇의 구로 그룹핑하여 발음함으로써 발화한다. 이것은 듣는 사람으로 하여금 발화의 의미와 의도를 잘 파악하도록 도와준다. 특히, 이러한 목적으로 발화자는 무의식적으로 운율정보(억양, 장단, 리듬 등)를 적절히 사용하게 된다. 본 논문에서는 발화된 문장에서 운율경계를 인식의 단위로 하는 음성인식방법에 대하여 제안한다. 즉, 발화된 문장을 운율구단위로 나누는 방법을 제안하고 나누어진 단위에 따라 연속음 인식실험을 수행하였다. 인식실험결과 연속음인식 시간의 감소를 관찰할 수 있었으며, 물론 음성인식률도 20-10%정도 증가하였다.

• 인지과학
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• 제23권2호
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• pp.249-267
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• 2012

본 연구에서는 구문 처리에서 운율 정보 활용이 작업 기억 용량의 영향을 받는지를 검증하였다. 구체적으로 작업 기억 용량이 운율 경계의 강도와 위치에 따른 관계절 부착 중의성 해소 방식 차이를 예측하는지를 알아보았다. 실험 결과, 작업 기억 폭이 큰 청자들의 중의성 해소 방식이 작업 기억 폭이 작은 청자들에 비해 운율 경계 강도의 영향을 더 받는 것으로 나타났다. 이는 다른 상위 수준 제약과 마찬가지로 운율 제약의 활용도 작업 기억과 같은 인지적 자원을 필요로 함을 시사한다.

• 음성과학
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• 제6권
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• pp.181-195
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• 1999

This study proposes a method of recognizing postpositions and suffixes in Korean spoken language, using prosodic information. We detect grammatical boundaries automatically at first, by using prosodic information of the accentual phrase, and then we recognize grammatical function words by backward-tracking from the boundaries. The experiment employs 300 sentential speech data of 10 men's and 5 women's voice spoken in standard Korean, in which 1080 accentual phrases and 11 postpositions and suffixes are included. The result shows the recognition rate of postpositions in two cases. In one case in which only correctly detected boundaries are included, the recognition rate is 97.5%, and in the other case in which all detected boundaries are included, the recognition rate is 74.8%.

• 음성과학
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• 제13권1호
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• pp.29-41
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• 2006

This study investigates the degree to which various prosodic cues at the boundaries of prosodic phrases in Korean contribute to word segmentation. Since most phonological words in Korean are produced as one Accentual Phrase (AP), it was hypothesized that the detection of acoustic cues at AP boundaries would facilitate word segmentation. The prosodic characteristics of Korean APs include initial strengthening at the beginning of the phrase and pitch rise and final lengthening at the end. A perception experiment utilizing an artificial language learning paradigm revealed that cues conforming to the aforementioned prosodic characteristics of Korean facilitated listeners' word segmentation. Results also indicated that duration and amplitude cues were more helpful in segmentation than pitch. Nevertheless, results did show that a pitch cue that did not conform to the Korean AP interfered with segmentation.

• 대한음성학회:학술대회논문집
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• 대한음성학회 2007년도 한국음성과학회 공동학술대회 발표논문집
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• pp.114-118
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• 2007

The current study investigates the degree to which various prosodic cues at the boundaries of a prosodic phrase in Korean (Accentual Phrase) contributed to word segmentation. Since most phonological words in Korean are produced as one AP, it was hypothesized that the detection of acoustic cues at AP boundaries would facilitate word segmentation. The prosodic characteristics of Korean APs include initial strengthening at the beginning of the phrase and pitch rise and final lengthening at the end. A perception experiment revealed that the cues that conform to the above-mentioned prosodic characteristics of Korean facilitated listeners' word segmentation. Results also showed that duration and amplitude cues were more helpful in segmentation than pitch. Further, the results showed that a pitch cue that did not conform to the Korean AP interfered with segmentation.

• 대한음성학회지:말소리
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• 제33_34호
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• pp.23-42
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• 1997

This study has two main purposes. One is to explore the relationship between syntactic aspects and prosodic aspects in Standard Korean. The other is to provide speech synthesis with the information about such relationship. This study will focus on the prosodic behavior of subjective particles'-i/-ga', '-eun/-neun'. The prosodic features of subjective particles are described respectively. How do the elements such as the position of particles in a sentence, the sentence constituents, the length of the sentence and the rhythmic boundaries influence on the prosodic behavior are also investigated.

• The Journal of the Acoustical Society of Korea
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• 제18권1E호
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• pp.27-31
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• 1999

Recent linguistic researches have brought into focus the relations between prosodic structures and syntactic, semantic or phonological structures. Most of them prove that prosodic information is available for understanding syntactic, semantic and discourse structures. But this result has not been integrated yet into recent Korean speech recognition or understanding systems. This study, as a part of integrating prosodic information into the speech recognition system, proposes an automatic detection technique of Korean accentual phrase boundaries by using one-stage DP, and the normalized pitch pattern. For making the normalized pitch pattern, this study proposes a method of modified normalization for Korean spoken language. For the experiment, this study employs 192 sentential speech data of 12 men's voice spoken in standard Korean, in which 720 accentual phrases are included, and 74.4% of the accentual phrase boundaries are correctly detected while 14.7% are the false detection rate.

• 대한음성학회:학술대회논문집
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• 대한음성학회 2006년도 추계학술대회 발표논문집
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• pp.117-119
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• 2006

This paper discusses the importance of silent pauses in the perception of prosodic boundaries in Korean speech. It is suggested that in speech in general, and in particular in spontaneous speech, silent pauses are neither necessary nor sufficient for the perception of prosodic boundaries. In read speech, however, there is a high correlation between the presence of a pause and the perception of a boundary. An experiment was carried out to determine whether removing the silent boundary from an extract of speech had a significant effect on the perception of boundaries in Korean read speech. Results suggest that while the presence of a silent boundary slightly reinforces the perception of a prosodic boundary, subjects are in general capable of perceiving the boundary without the silent pause.