This study examines the acoustic characteristics of Korean stops of two dialects, Seoul and Kyungsang, focusing on VOT(Voice Onset Time). 8 speakers of these two dialects were asked to read 590 words which contain the stops of different places of articulation and phonation types. The results showed that overall the VOTs of Kyungsang dialect were shorter than those of Seoul dialect. This was more prominent in lenis stops than in fortis or aspirated stops. It was also shown that there were significant VOT overlapping differences between the two dialects.

This experimental study shows that, in reading of the English isolated words that are enumerated, the releasing of the word-final stop is employed for signaling enumeration in company with the well-known intonational pattern for it. Furthermore, this study tries to find the aspects of the releasing of the stops in the word-final positions, focusing on the association of the stop releasing/nonreleasing with i) the POA (Place of Articulation) distinction of the word-final stop, ii) the various qualities of the vowel before the final stop, and iii) the voice distinction of the stop in the word-final position.

This study deals with the disguised voice (or voice disguise) in the field of forensic phonetics. We especially studied the effects of the methods of disguised voice on the aural decision. Within the nonelectronic-deliberate voice disguise area, the methods of disguised voice include use of lowered pitch, pinched nostrils, falsetto, and whisper. Ten (male:5, female:5) Seoul speakers made a recording of 16 sentences. In the aural test, 30 subjects listened normal and disguised voice. And they were asked to make a decision whether speakers identified or not. The result is as follows: The speaker verification of the falsetto and whisper was more difficult than the lowered pitch and pinched nostrils.

In this paper, we evaluate and compare the performance of speech/music discrimination based on various feature parameters and classifiers. As for feature parameters, we consider High Zero Crossing Rate Ratio (HZCRR), Low Short Time Energy Ratio (LSTER), Spectral Flux (SF), Line Spectral Pair (LSP) distance, entropy and dynamism. We also examine three classifiers: k Nearest Neighbor (k-NN), Gaussian Mixure Model (GMM), and Hidden Markov Model (HMM). According to our experiments, LSP distance and phoneme-recognizer-based feature set (entropy and dunamism) show good performance, while performance differences due to different classifiers are not significant. When all the six feature parameters are employed, average speech/music discrimination accuracy up to 96.6% is achieved.

In order to produce high quality synthesized speech, it is very important to get an accurate grapheme-to-phoneme conversion and prosody model from texts using natural language processing. Robust preprocessing for non-Korean characters should also be required. In this paper, we analyzed Korean texts using a morphological analyzer, part-of-speech tagger and syntactic chunker. We present a new grapheme-to-phoneme conversion method for Korean using a hybrid method with a phonetic pattern dictionary and CCV (consonant vowel) LTS (letter to sound) rules, for unlimited vocabulary Korean TTS. We constructed a prosody model using a probabilistic method and decision tree-based method. The probabilistic method atone usually suffers from performance degradation due to inherent data sparseness problems. So we adopted tree-based error correction to overcome these training data limitations.

In this paper, we employ the adaptive comb filtering for effective noise reduction in mobile communication environment. Adaptive comb filtering is a well-known method for noise reduction, but requires correct pitch period and must be applied just in voiced speech frames. To satisfy these requirements we use two kinds of information extracted from speech packets, one of which is the pitch period information measured precisely by a speech coder and the other is the frame rate information related to a decision on speech or silence frame. Experiments on speech recognition system confirm the efficiency of this method. Feature parameters employing this method give superior performance in noise environment to those extracted directly from output speech.

Channel distortion and coarticulation effect in the Korean connected digit telephone speech make it difficult to achieve high performance of connected digit recognition in the telephone environment. In this paper, as a basic research to improve the recognition performance of Korean connected digit telephone speech, recognition error patterns are investigated and analyzed. Korean connected digit telephone speech database released by SiTEC and HTK system are used for recognition experiments. Both DWFBA and MRTCN methods are used for feature extraction and channel compensation, respectively. Experimental results are discussed with our findings.

In this paper, we present an English pronunciation correction system for Korean speakers and show some of experimental results on it. The aim of the system is to detect mispronounced phonemes in spoken words and to give appropriate correction comments to users. There are several English pronunciation correction systems adopting speech recognition technology, however, most of them use conventional speech recognition engines. From this reason, they could not give phoneme based correction comments to users. In our system, we build two kinds of phoneme models: standard native speaker models and Korean's error models. We also design recognition network based on phonemes to detect Koreans' common mispronunciations. We get 90% detection rate in insertion/deletion/replacement of phonemes, but we cannot get high detection rate in diphthong split and accents.

In this paper, we proposed Background Model Set algorithm used in the speaker verification to improve calculating confidence measure(CM) in speech recognition. CM is to display relative likelihood between recognized models and antiphone models. In previous method calculating of CM, we calculated probability and standard deviation using all phonemes in composition of antiphone models. At this process, antiphone CM brought bad recognition result. Also, recognition time increases. In order to solve this problem, we studied about method to reconstitute average and standard deviation using BMS algorithm in CM calculation.

This paper presents our language model adaptation for Korean spontaneous speech recognition. Korean spontaneous speech is observed various characteristics of content and style such as filled pauses, word omission, and contraction as compared with the written text corpus. Our approaches focus on improving the estimation of domain-dependent n-gram models by relevance weighting out-of-domain text data, where style is represented by n-gram based tf/sup */idf similarity. In addition to relevance weighting, we use disfluencies as Predictor to the neighboring words. The best result reduces 9.7% word error rate relatively and shows that n-gram based relevance weighting reflects style difference greatly and disfluencies are good predictor also.

This paper presents segmental labeling conventions proposed by SiTEC (Speech Information Technology Engineering Center) 2002 and proposes a new directions of a revision for a simpler version. The paper also reviews one of the prosody labelling conventions for Korean, K-ToBI convention(ver. 3.1) and proposes a couple of modifications and suggestions.

In this paper, we'd like to briefly introduce Korean common speech database, which project has been started to construct a large scaled speech database since 2002. The project aims at supporting the R&D environment of the speech technology for industries. It encourages domestic speech industries and activates speech technology domestic market. In the first year, the resulting common speech database consists of 25 kinds of databases considering various recording conditions such as telephone, PC, VoIP etc. The speech database will be widely used for speech recognition, speech synthesis, and speaker identification. On the other hand, although the database was originally corrected by manual, still it retains unknown errors and human errors. So, in order to minimize the errors in the database, we tried to find the errors based on the recognition errors and classify several kinds of errors. To be more effective than typical recognition technique, we will develop the automatic error detection method. In the future, we will try to construct new databases reflecting the needs of companies and universities.

K-SEC (Korean-Spoken English Corpus) is a kind of speech database that is being under construction by the authors of this paper This article discusses the needs of the K-SEC from various academic disciplines and industrial circles, and it introduces the characteristics of the K-SEC design, its catalogues and contents of the recorded database, exemplifying what are being considered from both Korean and English languages' phonetics and phonologies. The K-SEC can be marked as a beginning of a parallel speech corpus, and it is suggested that a similar corpus should be enlarged for the future advancements of the experimental phonetics and the speech information technology.

To support speech information technology industry it is vital to create and distribute standardized speech corpora to be used for the development of products and technologies. In this article we introduce speech corpora created by Speech Information Technology & Industry Promotion Center(SiTEC) during its 1st and 2nd fiscal years (2001/5/1-2003/4/30) and plans for those corpora which is being created currently or will be created in near future. We introduce the corpus for car application to expand speech information technology to the field of traditional industry, the corpora for foreign languages to support exportation, the corpus for basic research for the sake of application in the industry, the corpora for common use, and others.