• 대한음성학회:학술대회논문집
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• 대한음성학회 2003년도 5월 학술대회지
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• pp.163-167
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• 2003

Intonation as suprasegmental phonetic features conveys meanings on the postlexical or utterance level in a linguistically structured way. It includes three aspects: tunes, relative prominence, and intonational phrasing. In this article, I will treat how prosodic phrasing is functionally related to the listening comprehension of English by analysing the students' errors of listening comprehension. When utterance meaning is conveyed, it is realized to be divided into intonational phrases. The small intonational phrase is regarded as an intermediate phrase which has a primary accent and a phrase tone or audible break. Most students' errors of listening occurred with linking pronunciation in the intermediate phrases of the fast speech. Thus through the smallest unit with tune we can help students improve their pronunciation and listening ability of English.

• Journal of Computing Science and Engineering
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• 제2권1호
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• pp.1-25
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• 2008

Spoken dialog tasks incur many errors including speech recognition errors, understanding errors, and even dialog management errors. These errors create a big gap between the user's intention and the system's understanding, which eventually results in a misinterpretation. To fill in the gap, people in human-to-human dialogs try to clarify the major causes of the misunderstanding to selectively correct them. This paper presents a method of clarification techniques to human-to-machine spoken dialog systems. We viewed the clarification dialog as a two-step problem-Belief confirmation and Clarification strategy establishment. To confirm the belief, we organized the clarification process into three systematic phases. In the belief confirmation phase, we consider the overall dialog system's processes including speech recognition, language understanding and semantic slot and value pairs for clarification dialog management. A clarification expert is developed for establishing clarification dialog strategy. In addition, we proposed a new design of plugging clarification dialog module in a given expert based dialog system. The experiment results demonstrate that the error verifiers effectively catch the word and utterance-level semantic errors and the clarification experts actually increase the dialog success rate and the dialog efficiency.

• 말소리와 음성과학
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• 제7권2호
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• pp.63-73
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• 2015

This study investigated longitudinally early vocalization and phonological developments of typically developing children. Ten typically developing children participated in the study from 9 months to 18 months of age. Spontaneous utterance samples were collected at 9, 12, 15, 18 months of age and phonetically transcribed and analyzed. Utterance samples were classified into 5 levels using Stark Assessment of Early Vocal Development-Revised(SAEVD-R). The data analysis focused on 4 and 5 levels of vocalizations classified by SAEVD-R and word productions. The percentage of each vocalization level, vocalization length, syllable structures, and consonant inventory were obtained. The results showed that the percentages of level 4 and 5 vocalizations and word significantly increased with age and the production of syllable structures containing consonants significantly increased around 12 and 15 months of age. On average, the children produced 4 types of syllable structure and 5.4 consonants at 9 months and they produced 5 types of syllable structure and 9.8 consonants at 18 months. The phonological development patterns in this study were consistent with those analyzed from children's meaningful utterances in previous studies. The results support the perspective on the continuity between babbling and early speech. This study has clinical implications in early identification and speech-language intervention for young children with speech delays or at risk.

• 한국어교육
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• 제28권2호
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• pp.37-60
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• 2017

This research has its basis with focus on the way Korean native speakers recognize Chinese Korean-learners' pronunciation. The objective of the study is to lay the cornerstone for establishing effective teaching-learning strategies for the education of the Korean phonetic system. In this study, the results of the experiment are presented which shows how native speakers of Korean identify Chinese Korean-learners' pronunciation of consonants. In the first place, stimulation tones were created from the original utterances of Chinese Korean-learners and seven scripts were made through the Pratt program. In addition, the subjects were asked to choose what the phonetic materials sounded like. The results of the research are represented as the ratio of frequency of Korean native speakers' response to each utterance to the total frequency. In addition, the paired t-test was taken in order to explore any relatedness to the changes in the level of proficiency of the Korean phonetic system, ranging from beginners to advanced learners. The outcome shows that the mistakes which Chinese Korean-learners make in pronouncing the consonants of Korean are relatively well-reflected in Korean native speakers' auditory cognitive reactions. To put it concretely, there is some difficulty in differentiating lax consonants from aspirates in the cases of plosives and affricates, but relatively little trouble with fortes. However, it is revealed that there is also a slight difference in relation to articulatory positions in detailed aspects. To provide an effective teaching method for the Korean phonetic system, it is essential to comprehend learners' phonetic mistakes through the precise analysis of data in terms of 'production.' Also, a more meticulous observation of 'phenomena' must be made through verification from the view of 'reception,' as attempted in this study. A more thorough diagnosis by applying methodology makes it possible to lay the foundation for developing effective teaching-learning strategies for the instruction of the Korean phonetic system. This study has its significance in making such attempts.

• 한국군사과학기술학회지
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• 제27권2호
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• pp.167-176
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• 2024

Lip-reading is the task of inferring the speaker's utterance from silent video based on learning of lip movements. It is very challenging due to the inherent ambiguities present in the lip movement such as different characters that produce the same lip appearances. Recent advances in deep learning models such as Transformer and Temporal Convolutional Network have led to improve the performance of lip-reading. However, most previous works deal with English lip-reading which has limitations in directly applying to Korean lip-reading, and moreover, there is no a large scale Korean lip-reading dataset. In this paper, we introduce the first large-scale Korean lip-reading dataset with more than 120 k utterances collected from TV broadcasts containing news, documentary and drama. We also present a preprocessing method which uniformly extracts a facial region of interest and propose a transformer-based model based on grapheme unit for sentence-level Korean lip-reading. We demonstrate that our dataset and model are appropriate for Korean lip-reading through statistics of the dataset and experimental results.

• 한국음향학회지
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• 제21권4호
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• pp.380-386
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• 2002

Rahim의 논문 (M.G. Rahim, et al., PROC. of ICASSP96, 1996)과 같은 기존의 후처리 방법은 음소 모델과 반모델 (anti-model)의 유사도를 이용하여 음소 단위 신뢰도를 계산하고, 이들의 평균을 단어 단위 신뢰도로 정의한다. 그런데 음소단위의 신뢰도가 동일한 확률밀도함수를 갖는 것이 아니기 때문에 특정단어의 경우 계산된 신뢰도는 대체로 낮은 값을 갖는다. 이를 극복하기 위한 방법으로서, 본 논문에서는 기존의 신뢰도를 통계적으로 정규화한 신뢰도를 제안한다. 즉 음소단위의 신뢰도가 가우시안 분포를 갖는다고 가정한 후 트라이 폰(sri-phone) 단위로 정규화하여 동일한 정규분포를 갖도록 한다. 본 논문에서는 제안된 방법의 검증을 위하여 문맥종속 핵심어 모델과 문맥독립 필러 모델을 이용한 일반적인 핵심어 검출기를 사용하였다. 실험결과 제안된 정규화 신뢰도 (NCM: Normalized Confidence Measure)가 불검출율 (WDR: Missed Detection Rate) 8%정도에서 오검출율 (PAR: false alarm rate)을 0.44에서 0.33 FA/KW/HR (false alarm/keyword/hour)로 저하시켰다. 이것은 오검출율에서 성능이 25% 향상된 것이다.

• 말소리와 음성과학
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• 제2권3호
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• pp.135-139
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• 2010

Forensic speaker identification needs high accuracy and reliability. However, the current level of speaker identification does not reach its demand. Therefore, the confidence evaluation of results is one of the issues in forensic speaker identification. In this paper, we propose a new confidence measure of forensic speaker identification system. This is based on pitch differences between the registered utterances of the identified speaker and the test utterance. In the experiments, we evaluate this confidence measure by speech identification tasks on various environments. As the results, the proposed measure can be a good measure indicating if the result is reliable or not.

• 대한음성학회지:말소리
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• 제56호
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• pp.185-194
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• 2005

In this paper, we present POSSDM (POSTECH Situation-Based Dialogue Manager) for a spoken dialogue system using a new example and situation-based dialogue management technique for effective generation of appropriate system responses. Spoken dialogue system should generate cooperative responses to smoothly control dialogue flow with the users. We introduce a new dialogue management technique incorporating dialogue examples and situation-based rules for EPG (Electronic Program Guide) domain. For the system response inference, we automatically construct and index a dialogue example database from dialogue corpus, and the best dialogue example is retrieved for a proper system response with the query from a dialogue situation including a current user utterance, dialogue act, and discourse history. When dialogue corpus is not enough to cover the domain, we also apply manually constructed situation-based rules mainly for meta-level dialogue management.

• 대한음성학회:학술대회논문집
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• 대한음성학회 2006년도 추계학술대회 발표논문집
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• pp.75-79
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• 2006

In this study, we investigate ways that focus is realized in English utterances produced by native speakers of English and Korean learners. As compared to the previous studies which deal mainly with functional aspects of focus as a part of intonational structure, we attempt to provide more quantitative information on F0 and discover the extent to which Korean learners distinguish focus types in their English utterance production. On the test sentences designed to be disambiguated by correct focus realization, it is found that, even advanced-level Korean learners, unlike native speakers, hardly employ F0 to clarify the specific meaning of English utterances.

• 말소리와 음성과학
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• 제1권3호
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• pp.29-37
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• 2009

This paper presents results from speech production experiments on English, Korean, and Hindi that compare variation in the acoustic expression of dissimilar phonological laryngeal contrast in stops conditioned by prosodic prominence. Target stops are analyzed from utterance-initial, -medial, and -final positions, with a variation in contrastive focal accent, from the speech data by six male American English speakers, five male Seoul Korean speakers, and five male Delhi Hindi speakers. The results show that prosodic prominence conditions enhanced distinctiveness between contrastive segments in the three languages. The manner in which prosodic prominence and prosodic phrase structure is marked at the level of segmental variation is, however, found to be language-specific to some extent. In addition, a correlation between the size of the phonological inventory and the corresponding acoustic variation was found but the linear correlation was not strongly supported with the findings in the present study.