• The Journal of the Acoustical Society of Korea
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• v.28 no.2E
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• pp.43-50
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• 2009

To get more natural synthetic speech generated by a Korean TTS (Text-To-Speech) system, we have to know all the possible prosodic rules in Korean spoken language. We should find out these rules from linguistic, phonetic information or from real speech. In general, all of these rules should be integrated into a prosody-generation algorithm in a TTS system. But this algorithm cannot cover up all the possible prosodic rules in a language and it is not perfect, so the naturalness of synthesized speech cannot be as good as we expect. ANNs (Artificial Neural Networks) can be trained to learn the prosodic rules in Korean spoken language. To train and test ANNs, we need to prepare the prosodic patterns of all the phonemic segments in a prosodic corpus. A prosodic corpus will include meaningful sentences to represent all the possible prosodic rules. Sentences in the corpus were made by picking up a series of words from the list of PB (phonetically Balanced) isolated words. These sentences in the corpus were read by speakers, recorded, and collected as a speech database. By analyzing recorded real speech, we can extract prosodic pattern about each phoneme, and assign them as target and test patterns for ANNs. ANNs can learn the prosody from natural speech and generate prosodic patterns of the central phonemic segment in phoneme strings as output response of ANNs when phoneme strings of a sentence are given to ANNs as input stimuli.

• International Journal of Internet, Broadcasting and Communication
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• v.12 no.4
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• pp.148-155
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• 2020

This study investigated learners' perceptions of using self-generated listening materials based on Text to Speech. After taking an online training session to learn how to make listening materials for extensive listening practice outside the classroom, the learners were engaged in practice with self-generated listening materials for 10 weeks in a self-directed way. The results show that a majority of the learners found the TTS-based listening materials helpful to reduce anxiety toward listening and enhance self-confidence and motivation, with a positive effect on improving their listening ability. The learners' general satisfaction can be attributed to some beneficial features of TTS-based listening material, including freedom to choose what they want to learn, convenient accessibility to the material, availability of various native speakers' voices, and novelty of digital tools. This suggests that TTS-based digital listening materials can be a useful educational tool to support learners' self-directed listening practice outside the classroom in EFL settings.

• Journal of the Korea Academia-Industrial cooperation Society
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• v.21 no.7
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• pp.699-707
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• 2020

With the development of deep learning technology, voice processing-related technology is applied to various areas, such as STT (Speech To Text), TTS (Text To Speech), ChatBOT, and intelligent personal assistant. In particular, the STT is a voice-based, relevant service that changes human languages to text, so it can be applied to various IT related services. Recently, many places, such as general private enterprises and public institutions, are attempting to introduce the relevant technology. On the other hand, in contrast to the general IT solution that can be evaluated quantitatively, the standard and methods of evaluating the accuracy of the STT engine are ambiguous, and they do not consider the characteristics of the Korean language. Therefore, it is difficult to apply the quantitative evaluation standard. This study aims to provide a guide to an evaluation of the STT engine conversion performance based on the characteristics of the Korean language, so that engine manufacturers can perform the STT conversion based on the characteristics of the Korean language, while the market could perform a more accurate evaluation. In the experiment, a 35% more accurate evaluation could be performed compared to the existing methods.

• The Journal of the Acoustical Society of Korea
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• v.28 no.2
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• pp.155-163
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• 2009

In text-to-speech systems, the conversion of text into prosodic parameters is necessarily composed of three steps. These are the placement of prosodic boundaries. the determination of segmental durations, and the specification of fundamental frequency contours. Prosodic boundaries. as the most important and basic parameter. affect the estimation of durations and fundamental frequency. Break prediction is an important step in text-to-speech systems as break indices (BIs) have a great influence on how to correctly represent prosodic phrase boundaries, However. an accurate prediction is difficult since BIs are often chosen according to the meaning of a sentence or the reading style of the speaker. In Japanese, the prediction of an accentual phrase boundary (APB) and major phrase boundary (MPB) is particularly difficult. Thus, this paper presents a method to complement the prediction errors of an APB and MPB. First, we define a subtle BI in which it is difficult to decide between an APB and MPB clearly as a variable break (VB), and an explicit BI as a fixed break (FB). The VB is chosen using the classification and regression tree, and multiple prosodic targets in relation to the pith and duration are then generated. Finally. unit-selection is conducted using multiple prosodic targets. In the MOS test result. the original speech scored a 4,99. while proposed method scored a 4.25 and conventional method scored a 4.01. The experimental results show that the proposed method improves the naturalness of synthesized speech.

• Journal of the Korean Institute of Telematics and Electronics
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• v.27 no.1
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• pp.143-150
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• 1990

In this paper, a rule-based method for improving the intelligibility of synthetic speech is proposed. A 12-pole linear prediction coding method is used to model syllable speech signals. A syllable concatenation rule for pause and frame rejection between syllables is developed to improve the naturalness of the synthetic speech. In addition, phonoligical structure transform rule and prosody rule are applied to the synthetic speech by LPC. The illustrative results demonstrate that the synthetic speech obtained by applying these rules has better naturalness than the synthetic speech by LPC.

• Proceedings of the KSPS conference
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• 2005.11a
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• pp.103-106
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• 2005

In this paper, we propose a language modeling approach to improve the performance of a large vocabulary continuous speech recognition system. The proposed approach is based on the active learning framework that helps to select a text corpus from a plenty amount of text data required for language modeling. The perplexity is used as a measure for the corpus selection in the active learning. From the recognition experiments on the task of continuous Korean speech, the speech recognition system employing the language model by the proposed language modeling approach reduces the word error rate by about 6.6 % with less computational complexity than that using a language model constructed with randomly selected texts.

• Annual Conference on Human and Language Technology
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• 1995.10a
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• pp.35-38
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• 1995

Text-to-speech 시스템은 텍스트를 입력으로 받아 텍스트와 일치하는 음성을 출력하는 시스템으로, 인간이 자신의 모국어로 텍스트를 읽는 것과 비슷한 수준의 음성을 출력하는 데 목적이 있다. 한국어의 각 단어들은 한 단어 내에 있는 형태소들 사이에 음운 변동 현상을 일으켜 쓰여진 형태와 다르게 발음된다. 그러므로 한국어 텍스트를 자연스럽게 발음하기 위해서는 음운 변동 현상을 효율적으로 처리할 수 있어야 한다. 한국어에서 음운 변동을 일으키는 규칙은 여러 가지이고, 정확한 발음을 위해서는 이러한 규칙들이 차례대로 적용되어져야 한다. 따라서 본 논문에서는 이러한 한국어의 발음상의 특성을 고려하여 two-level 모델에 기반한 음운 변동 시스템을 구현한다.

• The Transactions of the Korea Information Processing Society
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• v.13 no.4
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• pp.174-180
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• 2024

In this paper, we explore an emotion classification method through multimodal learning utilizing wav2vec 2.0 and KcELECTRA models. It is known that multimodal learning, which leverages both speech and text data, can significantly enhance emotion classification performance compared to methods that solely rely on speech data. Our study conducts a comparative analysis of BERT and its derivative models, known for their superior performance in the field of natural language processing, to select the optimal model for effective feature extraction from text data for use as the text processing model. The results confirm that the KcELECTRA model exhibits outstanding performance in emotion classification tasks. Furthermore, experiments using datasets made available by AI-Hub demonstrate that the inclusion of text data enables achieving superior performance with less data than when using speech data alone. The experiments show that the use of the KcELECTRA model achieved the highest accuracy of 96.57%. This indicates that multimodal learning can offer meaningful performance improvements in complex natural language processing tasks such as emotion classification.

• Proceedings of the KSPS conference
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• 2000.03a
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• pp.17-31
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• 2000

• Proceedings of the KSPS conference
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• 2000.03a
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• pp.95-102
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• 2000