• MALSORI
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• no.65
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• pp.105-124
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• 2008

This paper presents the effects of different phone-like-unit (PLU) sets in order to propose an optimal PLU set for the performance improvement of Korean automatic speech recognition (ASR) systems. The examination of 9 currently used PLU sets indicates that most of them include a selection of allophones without any sufficient phonetic base. In this paper, a total of 34 PLU sets are designed based on Korean phonetic characteristics arid the effects of each PLU set are evaluated through experiments. The results show that the accuracy rate of each phone is influenced by different phonetic constraint(s) which determine(s) the PLU sets, and that an optimal PLU set can be anticipated through the phonetic analysis of the given speech data.

• Proceedings of the Acoustical Society of Korea Conference
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• 1998.08a
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• pp.87-92
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• 1998

In general, the synthesis unit database was constructed by recording isolated word. In that case, each boundary of word has typical prosodic pattern like a falling intonation or preboundary lengthening. To get natural synthetic speech using these kinds of database, we must artificially distort original speech. However, that artificial process rather resulted in unnatural, unintelligible synthetic speech due to the excessive prosodic modification on speech signal. To overcome these problems, we gathered thousands of sentences for synthesis database. To make a phone level synthesis unit, we trained speech recognizer with the recorded speech, and then segmented phone boundaries automatically. In addition, we used laryngo graph for the epoch detection. From the automatically generated synthesis database, we chose the best phone and directly concatenated it without any prosody processing. To select the best phone among multiple phone candidates, we used prosodic information such as break strength of word boundaries, phonetic contexts, cepstrum, pitch, energy, and phone duration. From the pilot test, we obtained some positive results.

• The Journal of the Acoustical Society of Korea
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• v.23 no.2
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• pp.173-179
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• 2004

Due to the insufficiency of training data in large vocabulary continuous speech recognition, similar context dependent phones can be clustered by decision trees to share the data. When the decision trees are built and used to predict unseen triphones, a phonetic question set is required. The phonetic question set, which contains categories of the phones with similar co-articulation effects, is usually generated by phonetic or linguistic experts. This knowledge-based approach for generating phonetic question set, however, may reduce the homogeneity of the clusters. Moreover, the experts must adjust the question sets whenever the language or the PLU (phone-like unit) of a recognition system is changed. Therefore, we propose a data-driven method to automatically generate phonetic question set. Since the proposed method generates the phone categories using speech data distribution, it is not dependent on the language or the PLU, and may enhance the homogeneity of the clusters. In large vocabulary speech recognition experiments, the proposed algorithm has been found to reduce the error rate by 14.3%.

• Journal of the Korea Convergence Society
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• v.1 no.1
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• pp.23-29
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• 2010

The various kinds of application is distributed for the Smart phone user recently. There is the advantage that the open source application on Android operating system based Smart phone supports a multi tasking service. Layar, Wikitude, and Sherpa and the other applications using the GPS location information like an a2b etc. were developed in the Smart phone environment. However, the existing Cell-ID based location information can be directly collected by the mobile ISP unit which the mobile carrier installs, the personal privacy problem occurs. Therefore, the personal location information is possible to be exposed publicly without any access control procedure. Therefore, in this research, the self-control mechanism on the GPS location information at the Smart phone is designed and presented. Through this, it is possible to develop diverse applications providing enhanced access control and GPS location management on the Android based Smart Phone.

• Journal of the Institute of Electronics Engineers of Korea SD
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• v.48 no.10
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• pp.82-90
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• 2011

Because of the development of Smart phone devices, the demands of high performance FPU(Floating-point Unit) becomes increasing. Therefore, we propose the high-speed single-/double-precision FPU design that includes an elementary add/sub unit and improved multiplier and compare and convert units. The most commonly used add/sub unit is optimized by the parallel rounding unit. The matrix operation is used in complex calculation something like a graphic calculation. We designed the Multiply-Add Fused(MAF) instead of multiplier to calculate the matrix more quickly. The branch instruction that is decided by the compare operation is very frequently used in various programs. We bypassed the result of the compare operation before all the pipeline processes ended to decrease the total execution time. And we included additional convert operations that are added in IEEE754-2008 standard. To verify our RTL designs, we chose four hundred thousand test vectors by weighted random method and simulated each unit. The FPU that was synthesized by Samsung's 45-nm low-power process satisfied the 600-MHz operation frequency. And we confirm a reduction in area by comparing the improved FPU with the existing FPU.

• The Journal of the Acoustical Society of Korea
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• v.16 no.5
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• pp.50-59
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• 1997

In this paper, we implement an automatic speech segmentation and labeling system which marks phone boundaries automatically for constructing the Korean speech database. We specify and implement the system based on conventional speech segmentation and labeling techniques, and also develop the graphic user interface(GUI) on Hangul $Motif^{TM}$ environment for the users to examine the automatic alignment boundaries and to refine them easily. The developed system is applied to 16kHz sampled speech, and the labeling unit is composed of 46 phoneme-like units(PLUs) and silence. The system uses both of the phonetic and orthographic transcription as input methods of linguistic information. For pattern-matching method, hidden Markov models(HMM) is employed. Each phoneme model is trained using the manually segmented 445 phonetically balanced word (PBW) database. In order to evaluate the performance of the system, we test it using another database consisting of sentence-type speech. According to our experiment, 74.7% of phoneme boundaries are within 20ms of the true boundary and 92.8% are within 40ms.

• The Journal of the Acoustical Society of Korea
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• v.20 no.3
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• pp.24-33
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• 2001

this paper describes a baseline for an implementation of a corpus-based Korean TTS system. The conventional TTS systems using small-sized speech still generate machine-like synthetic speech. To overcome this problem we introduce the corpus-based TTS system which enables to generate natural synthetic speech without prosodic modifications. The corpus should be composed of a natural prosody of source speech and multiple instances of synthesis units. To make a phone level synthesis unit, we train a speech recognizer with the target speech, and then perform an automatic phoneme segmentation. We also detect the fine pitch period using Laryngo graph signals, which is used for prosodic feature extraction. For break strength allocation, 4 levels of break indices are decided as pause length and also attached to phones to reflect prosodic variations in phrase boundaries. To predict the break strength on texts, we utilize the statistical information of POS (Part-of-Speech) sequences. The best triphone sequences are selected by Viterbi search considering the minimization of accumulative Euclidean distance of concatenating distortion. To get high quality synthesis speech applicable to commercial purpose, we introduce a domain specific database. By adding domain specific database to general domain database, we can greatly improve the quality of synthetic speech on specific domain. From the subjective evaluation, the new Korean corpus-based TTS system shows better naturalness than the conventional demisyllable-based one.