• The Journal of the Acoustical Society of Korea
• /
• v.21 no.2
• /
• pp.199-210
• /
• 2002

In this paper, we carried out the study on speech recognition using the KM-Net topology design algorithm based on decision tree state-clustering to improve the performance of acoustic models in speech recognition. The Korean has many allophonic and grammatical rules compared to other languages, so we investigate the allophonic variations, which defined the Korean phonetics, and construct the phoneme question set for phonetic decision tree. The basic idea of the HM-Net topology design algorithm is that it has the basic structure of SSS (Successive State Splitting) algorithm and split again the states of the context-dependent acoustic models pre-constructed. That is, it have generated. the phonetic decision tree using the phoneme question sets each the state of models, and have iteratively trained the state sequence of the context-dependent acoustic models using the PDT-SSS (Phonetic Decision Tree-based SSS) algorithm. To verify the effectiveness of the above algorithm we carried out the speech recognition experiments for 452 words of center for Korean language Engineering (KLE452) and 200 sentences of air flight reservation task (YNU200). Experimental results show that the recognition accuracy has progressively improved according to the number of states variations after perform the splitting of states in the phoneme, word and continuous speech recognition experiments respectively. Through the experiments, we have got the average 71.5%, 99.2% of the phoneme, word recognition accuracy when the state number is 2,000, respectively and the average 91.6% of the continuous speech recognition accuracy when the state number is 800. Also we haute carried out the word recognition experiments using the HTK (HMM Too1kit) which is performed the state tying, compared to share the parameters of the HM-Net topology design algorithm. In word recognition experiments, the HM-Net topology design algorithm has an average of 4.0% higher recognition accuracy than the context-dependent acoustic models generated by the HTK implying the effectiveness of it.

• The Journal of the Acoustical Society of Korea
• /
• v.31 no.5
• /
• pp.298-308
• /
• 2012

This study was designed to examine the phoneme recognition errors of hearing-impaired (HI) listeners on a consonant-by-consonant basis, to show (1) how each HI ear perceives individual consonants differently and (2) how standard clinical measurements (i.e., using a tone and word) fail to predict these differences. Sixteen English consonant-vowel (CV) syllables of six signal-to-noise ratios in speech-weighted noise were presented at the most comfortable level for ears with mild-to-moderate sensorineural hearing loss. The findings were as follows: (1) individual HI listeners with a symmetrical pure-tone threshold showed different consonant-loss profiles (CLPs) (i.e., over a set of the 16 English consonants, the likelihood of misperceiving each consonant) in right and left ears. (2) A similar result was found across subjects. Paired ears of different HI individuals with identical pure-tone threshold presented different CLPs in one ear to the other. (3) Paired HI ears having the same averaged consonant score demonstrated completely different CLPs. We conclude that the standard clinical measurements are limited in their ability to predict the extent to which speech perception is degraded in HI ears, and thus they are a necessary, but not a sufficient measurement for HI speech perception. This suggests that the CV measurement would be a useful clinical tool.

• The Journal of the Acoustical Society of Korea
• /
• v.26 no.1E
• /
• pp.1-7
• /
• 2007

One result of the trend towards globalization is an increased number of projects that focus on natural language processing. Automatic speech recognition (ASR) technologies, for example, hold great promise in facilitating global communications and collaborations. Unfortunately, to date, most research projects focus on single widely spoken languages. Therefore, the cost to adapt a particular ASR tool for use with other languages is often prohibitive. This work takes a more general approach. We propose an International Phoneticizing Engine (IPE) that interprets input files supplied in our Phonetic Language Identity (PLI) format to build a dictionary. IPE is language independent and rule based. It operates by decomposing the dictionary creation process into a set of well-defined steps. These steps reduce rule conflicts, allow for rule creation by people without linguistics training, and optimize run-time efficiency. Dictionaries created by the IPE can be used with the Sphinx speech recognition system. IPE defines an easy-to-use systematic approach that can lead to internationalization of automatic speech recognition systems.

• The Journal of the Acoustical Society of Korea
• /
• v.40 no.5
• /
• pp.530-536
• /
• 2021

Recently, due to the development of deep learning, end-to-end speech recognition, which directly maps graphemes to speech signals, shows good performance. Especially, among the end-to-end models, conformer shows the best performance. However end-to-end models only focuses on the probability of which grapheme will appear at the time. The decoding process uses a greedy search or beam search. This decoding method is easily affected by the final probability output by the model. In addition, the end-to-end models cannot use external pronunciation and language information due to structual problem. Therefore, in this paper conformer with lexicon transducer is proposed. We compare phoneme-based model with lexicon transducer and grapheme-based model with beam search. Test set is consist of words that do not appear in training data. The grapheme-based conformer with beam search shows 3.8 % of CER. The phoneme-based conformer with lexicon transducer shows 3.4 % of CER.

• The Journal of the Acoustical Society of Korea
• /
• v.18 no.3
• /
• pp.3-9
• /
• 1999

This paper presents the study on the rejection capability based on anti-phone modeling for vocabulary independent speech recognition system. The rejection system detects and rejects out-of-vocabulary words which were not included in candidate words which are defined while the speech recognizer is made. The rejection system can be classified into two categories by their implementation methods, keyword spotting method and utterance verification method. The keyword spotting method uses an extra filler model as a candidate word as well as keyword models. The utterance verification method uses the anti-models for each phoneme for the calculation of confidence score after it has constructed the anti-models for all phonemes. We implemented an utterance verification algorithm which can be used for vocabulary independent speech recognizer. We also compared three kinds of means for the calculation of confidence score, and found out that the geometric mean had shown the best result. For the normalization of confidence score, usually Sigmoid function is used. On using it, we compared the effect of the weight constant for Sigmoid function and determined the optimal value. And we compared the effects of the size of cohort set, the results showed that the larger set gave the better results. And finally we found out optimal confidence score threshold value. In case of using the threshold value, the overall recognition rate including rejection errors was about 76%. This results are going to be adapted for stock information system based on speech recognizer which is currently provided as an experimental service by Korea Telecom.

• The Journal of the Acoustical Society of Korea
• /
• v.41 no.3
• /
• pp.359-366
• /
• 2022

In this paper, we present the Korean menu-ordering Sentence Text-to-Speech (TTS) system using conformer-based FastSpeech2. Conformer is the convolution-augmented transformer, which was originally proposed in Speech Recognition. Combining two different structures, the Conformer extracts better local and global features. It comprises two half Feed Forward module at the front and the end, sandwiching the Multi-Head Self-Attention module and Convolution module. We introduce the Conformer in Korean TTS, as we know it works well in Korean Speech Recognition. For comparison between transformer-based TTS model and Conformer-based one, we train FastSpeech2 and Conformer-based FastSpeech2. We collected a phoneme-balanced data set and used this for training our models. This corpus comprises not only general conversation, but also menu-ordering conversation consisting mainly of loanwords. This data set is the solution to the current Korean TTS model's degradation in loanwords. As a result of generating a synthesized sound using ParallelWave Gan, the Conformer-based FastSpeech2 achieved superior performance of MOS 4.04. We confirm that the model performance improved when the same structure was changed from transformer to Conformer in the Korean TTS.

• Journal of Korea Game Society
• /
• v.7 no.2
• /
• pp.83-90
• /
• 2007

One result of the trend towards globalization is an increased number of projects that focus on natural language processing. Automatic speech recognition (ASR) technologies, for example, hold great promise in facilitating global communications and collaborations. Unfortunately, to date, most research projects focus on single widely spoken languages. Therefore, the cost to adapt a particular ASR tool for use with other languages is often prohibitive. This work takes a more general approach. We propose an International Phoneticizing Engine (IPE) that interprets input files supplied in our Phonetic Language Identity (PLI) format to build a dictionary. IPE is language independent and rule based. It operates by decomposing the dictionary creation process into a set of well-defined steps. These steps reduce rule conflicts, allow for rule creation by people without linguistics training, and optimize run-time efficiency. Dictionaries created by the IPE can be used with the speech recognition system. IPE defines an easy-to-use systematic approach that can obtained 92.55% for the recognition rate of Korean speech and 89.93% for English.

• The Journal of Korea Institute of Information, Electronics, and Communication Technology
• /
• v.13 no.3
• /
• pp.197-205
• /
• 2020

Korean language has the characteristics that the pronunciation of phoneme units such as vowels and consonants are fixed and the pronunciation associated with a notation does not change, so that foreign learners can approach rather easily Korean language. However, when one pronounces words, phrases, or sentences, the pronunciation changes in a manner of a wide variation and complexity at the boundaries of syllables, and the association of notation and pronunciation does not hold any more. Consequently, it is very difficult for foreign learners to study Korean standard pronunciations. Despite these difficulties, it is believed that systematic analysis of pronunciation errors for Korean words is possible according to the advantageous observations that the relationship between Korean notations and pronunciations can be described as a set of firm rules without exceptions unlike other languages including English. In this paper, we propose a visualization framework which shows the differences between standard pronunciations and erratic ones as quantitative measures on the computer screen. Previous researches only show color representation and 3D graphics of speech properties, or an animated view of changing shapes of lips and mouth cavity. Moreover, the features used in the analysis are only point data such as the average of a speech range. In this study, we propose a method which can directly use the time-series data instead of using summary or distorted data. This was realized by using the deep learning-based technique which combines Self-organizing map, variational autoencoder model, and Markov model, and we achieved a superior performance enhancement compared to the method using the point-based data.