• MALSORI
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• no.54
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• pp.45-61
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• 2005

In this paper, we present a method of generating intonation contour for Korean text-to-speech (TTS) system and a method of synthesizing emotional speech, both based on Soft template mark-up language (Stem-ML), a novel prosody generation model combining mark-up tags and pitch generation in one. The evaluation shows that the intonation contour generated by Stem-ML is better than that by our previous work. It is also found that Stem-ML is a useful tool for generating emotional speech, by controling limited number of tags. Large-size emotional speech database is crucial for more extensive evaluation.

• Journal of the Korea Society of Computer and Information
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• v.19 no.11
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• pp.159-166
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• 2014

In this paper, we examine the role of emotional acoustic cues including both prosody and voice quality parameters for the modification of a word sense. For the extraction of prosody parameters and voice quality parameters, we used 60 pieces of speech data spoken by six speakers with five different emotional states. We analyzed eight different emotional acoustic cues, and used a discriminant analysis technique in order to find the dominant sequence of acoustic cues. As a result, we found that anger has a close relation with intensity level and 2nd formant bandwidth range; joy has a relative relation with the position of 2nd and 3rd formant values and intensity level; sadness has a strong relation only with prosody cues such as intensity level and pitch level; and fear has a relation with pitch level and 2nd formant value with its bandwidth range. These findings can be used as the guideline for find-tuning an emotional spoken language generation system, because these distinct sequences of acoustic cues reveal the subtle characteristics of each emotional state.

• Proceedings of the Acoustical Society of Korea Conference
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• spring
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• pp.15-18
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• 2002

Prosodic features of speech are known to play an important role in the transmission of linguistic information in human conversation. Their roles in the transmission of para- and non- linguistic information are even much more. In spite of their importance in human conversation, from engineering viewpoint, research focuses are mainly placed on segmental features, and not so much on prosodic features. With the aim of promoting research works on prosody, a research project 'Prosody and Speech Processing' is now going on. A rough sketch of the project is first given in the paper. Then, the paper introduces several prosody-related research works, which are going on in our laboratory. They include, corpus-based fundamental frequency contour generation, speech rate control for dialogue-like speech synthesis, analysis of prosodic features of emotional speech, reply speech generation in spoken dialogue systems, and language modeling with prosodic boundaries.

• Journal of Internet Computing and Services
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• v.23 no.2
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• pp.71-77
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• 2022

In this paper, a database is collected for extending the speech synthesis model to a model that synthesizes speech according to emotions and generating facial expressions. The database is divided into male and female data, and consists of emotional speech and facial expressions. Two professional actors of different genders speak sentences in Korean. Sentences are divided into four emotions: happiness, sadness, anger, and neutrality. Each actor plays about 3300 sentences per emotion. A total of 26468 sentences collected by filming this are not overlap and contain expression similar to the corresponding emotion. Since building a high-quality database is important for the performance of future research, the database is assessed on emotional category, intensity, and genuineness. In order to find out the accuracy according to the modality of data, the database is divided into audio-video data, audio data, and video data.

• Proceedings of the Korean Society of Broadcast Engineers Conference
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• 2020.07a
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• pp.453-455
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• 2020

본 논문은 시각 장애인을 위한 감정 음성 자막 서비스를 생성하는 종단 간(end-to-end) 감정 음성 합성 시스템(emotional text-to-speech synthesis system, TTS)의 음성 합성 속도를 높이면서도 합성음의 음질을 향상시키는 방법을 제안한다. 기존에 사용했던 전역 스타일 토큰(Global Style Token, GST)을 이용한 감정 음성 합성 방법은 다양한 감정을 표현할 수 있는 장점을 갖고 있으나, 합성음을 생성하는데 필요한 시간이 길고 학습할 데이터의 동적 영역을 효과적으로 처리하지 않으면 합성음에 클리핑(clipping) 현상이 발생하는 등 음질이 저하되는 양상을 보였다. 이를 보안하기 위해 본 논문에서는 새로운 데이터 전처리 과정을 도입하였고 기존의 보코더(vocoder)인 웨이브넷(WaveNet)을 웨이브알엔엔(WaveRNN)으로 대체하여 생성 속도와 음질 측면에서 개선됨을 보였다.

• Science of Emotion and Sensibility
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• v.11 no.4
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• pp.541-552
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• 2008

We cannot express emotions correctly with only speech because it is hard to estimate the kind, size, amount of emotions. Hamlet who is a protagonist in 'Hamlet' of Shakespeare has emotions which cannot be expressed within only speech because he is in various dramatic situations. So we supposed an artificial emotion, instead of expressing emotion with speech, expressing and visualizing current emotions with color and location. And we visualized emotions of characters in 'Hamlet' with the artificial emotion. We designed the artificial emotion to four steps considering peculiarities of emotion. First, the artificial emotion analyzes inputted emotional stimulus as relationship between causes and effects and analyzes its kinds and amounts. Second, we suppose Emotion Graph Unit to express generating, maintaining, decaying of analyzed one emotional stimuli which is outputted by first step, according to characteristic. Third, using Emotion Graph Unit, we suppose Emotion Graph that expresses continual same emotional stimulus. And we make Emotion Graph at each emotions, managing generation and decay of emotion individually. Last, we suppose Emotion Field can express current combined value of Emotion Graph according to co-relation of various emotions, and visualize current emotion by a color and a location in Emotion Field. We adjusted the artificial emotion to the play 'Hamlet' to test and visualize changes of emotion of Hamlet and his mother, Gertrude.

• Language and Information
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• v.17 no.2
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• pp.93-121
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• 2013

Identifying the speakers of individual utterances mentioned in textual stories is an important step towards developing applications that involve the use of unique characteristics of speakers in stories, such as robot storytelling and story-to-scene generation. Despite the usefulness, it is a challenging task because not only human entities but also animals and even inanimate objects can become speakers especially in fairytales so that the number of candidates is much more than that in other types of text. In addition, since the action of speaking is not always mentioned explicitly, it is necessary to infer the speaker from the implicitly mentioned speaking behaviors such as appearances or emotional expressions. In this paper, we investigate a method to exploit linguistic clues to identify the speakers of utterances from textual fairytale stories in Korean, especially in order to handle such challenging issues. Compared with the previous work, the present work takes into account additional linguistic features such as vocative roles and pairs of conversation participants, and proposes the use of discourse-level turn-taking behaviors between speakers to further reduce the number of possible candidate speakers. We describe a simple rule-based method to choose a speaker from candidates based on such linguistic features and turn-taking behaviors.