• MALSORI
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• no.49
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• pp.107-121
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• 2004

In this paper, we describe a cross-morpheme pronunciation variation model which is especially useful for constructing morpheme-based pronunciation lexicon to improve the performance of a Korean LVCSR. There are a lot of pronunciation variations occurring at morpheme boundaries in continuous speech. Since phonemic context together with morphological category and morpheme boundary information affect Korean pronunciation variations, we have distinguished phonological rules that can be applied to phonemes in within-morpheme and cross-morpheme. The results of 33K-morpheme Korean CSR experiments show that an absolute reduction of 1.45% in WER from the baseline performance of 18.42% WER was achieved by modeling proposed pronunciation variations with a possible multiple context-dependent pronunciation lexicon.

• Proceedings of the KSPS conference
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• 2003.05a
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• pp.75-78
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• 2003

In this paper, we describe a cross-morpheme pronunciation variation model which is especially useful for constructing morpheme-based pronunciation lexicon for Korean LVCSR. There are a lot of pronunciation variations occurring at morpheme boundaries in continuous speech. Since phonemic context together with morphological category and morpheme boundary information affect Korean pronunciation variations, we have distinguished pronunciation variation rules according to the locations such as within a morpheme, across a morpheme boundary in a compound noun, across a morpheme boundary in an eojeol, and across an eojeol boundary. In 33K-morpheme Korean CSR experiment, an absolute improvement of 1.16％ in WER from the baseline performance of 23.17％ WER is achieved by modeling cross-morpheme pronunciation variations with a context-dependent multiple pronunciation lexicon.

• Phonetics and Speech Sciences
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• v.7 no.3
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• pp.139-149
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• 2015

This paper aims to analyze pronunciation variations of loanwords produced by Korean and improve the performance of pronunciation modeling of loanwords in Korean by using syllable-based segmentation and phonological knowledge. The loanword text corpus used for our experiment consists of 14.5k words extracted from the frequently used words in set-top box, music, and point-of-interest (POI) domains. At first, pronunciations of loanwords in Korean are obtained by manual transcriptions, which are used as target pronunciations. The target pronunciations are compared with the standard pronunciation using confusion matrices for analysis of pronunciation variation patterns of loanwords. Based on the confusion matrices, three salient pronunciation variations of loanwords are identified such as tensification of fricative [s] and derounding of rounded vowel [ɥi] and [$w{\varepsilon}$]. In addition, a syllable-based segmentation method considering phonological knowledge is proposed for loanword pronunciation modeling. Performance of the baseline and the proposed method is measured using phone error rate (PER)/word error rate (WER) and F-score at various context spans. Experimental results show that the proposed method outperforms the baseline. We also observe that performance degrades when training and test sets come from different domains, which implies that loanword pronunciations are influenced by data domains. It is noteworthy that pronunciation modeling for loanwords is enhanced by reflecting phonological knowledge. The loanword pronunciation modeling in Korean proposed in this paper can be used for automatic speech recognition of application interface such as navigation systems and set-top boxes and for computer-assisted pronunciation training for Korean learners of English.

• Journal of KIISE:Software and Applications
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• v.34 no.2
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• pp.104-111
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• 2007

This paper examines how the performance of an automatic speech recognizer was improved for Korean Point-of-Interest (POI) data by modeling pronunciation variation using structural prosodic information such as prosodic words and syllable length. First, multiple pronunciation variants are generated using prosodic words given that each POI word can be broken down into prosodic words. And the cross-prosodic-word variations were modeled considering the syllable length of word. A total of 81 experiments were conducted using 9 test sets (3 baseline and 6 proposed) on 9 trained sets (3 baseline, 6 proposed). The results show: (i) the performance was improved when the pronunciation lexica were generated using prosodic words; (ii) the best performance was achieved when the maximum number of variants was constrained to 3 based on the syllable length; and (iii) compared to the baseline word error rate (WER) of 4.63%, a maximum of 8.4% in WER reduction was achieved when both prosodic words and syllable length were considered.

• MALSORI
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• v.55
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• pp.103-118
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• 2005

In this paper, we describe a morpheme-based pronunciation lexicon useful for Korean LVCSR. The phonemic-context-dependent multiple pronunciation lexicon improves the recognition accuracy when cross-morpheme pronunciation variations are distinguished from within-morpheme pronunciation variations. Since adding all possible pronunciation variants to the lexicon increases the lexicon size and confusability between lexical entries, we have developed a lexicon pruning scheme for optimal selection of pronunciation variants to improve the performance of Korean LVCSR. By building a proposed pronunciation lexicon, an absolute reduction of $0.56\%$ in WER from the baseline performance of $27.39\%$ WER is achieved by cross-morpheme pronunciation variations model with a phonemic-context-dependent multiple pronunciation lexicon. On the best performance, an additional reduction of the lexicon size by $5.36\%$ is achieved from the same lexical entries.

• The Journal of the Acoustical Society of Korea
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• v.20 no.2
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• pp.35-43
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• 2001

Many speech recognition systems have used pronunciation lexicon with possible multiple phonetic transcriptions for each word. The pronunciation lexicon is of often manually created. This process requires a lot of time and efforts, and furthermore, it is very difficult to maintain consistency of lexicon. To handle these problems, we present a model based on morphophon-ological analysis for automatically generating Korean pronunciation variants. By analyzing phonological variations frequently found in spoken Korean, we have derived about 700 phonemic contexts that would trigger the multilevel application of the corresponding phonological process, which consists of phonemic and allophonic rules. In generating pronunciation variants, morphological analysis is preceded to handle variations of phonological words. According to the morphological category, a set of tables reflecting phonemic context is looked up to generate pronunciation variants. Our experiments show that the proposed model produces mostly correct pronunciation variants of phonological words. Then we estimated how useful the pronunciation lexicon and training phonetic transcription using this proposed systems.

• Annual Conference on Human and Language Technology
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• 2006.10e
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• pp.51-56
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• 2006

일반적으로 운율 정보를 음성인식에 이용한 연구들에 있어서는 대부분 운율의 음향적 정보를 이용하는데 반하여, 본 연구에서는 운율어나 음절수와 같은 운율의 구조적 정보가 인식률 향상에 기여함을 보인다. 본 논문은 두 가지 운율 정보, 즉 운율어와 음절수를 이용하여 발음모델링을 할 경우에 음성인식기의 성능을 평가하는 것을 목표로 하는 것으로, 먼저, 운율어를 이용하여 위치 정보데이터의 가능한 모든 발음을 생성하고, 다시 음절 수를 기준으로 발음변이 수를 조절하는 방법을 제시한 다음, 제안한 방법에 의하여 생성한 발음사전을 이용하여 음성인식의 성능을 평가하였다. 실험결과 운율어를 이용하여 발음 사전을 제작한 모든 경우에 베이스라인과 비교하여 성능이 향상됨을 보였는데, 베이스라인의 WER 4.63% 에서 최대 8.4%의 WER 가 감소하였다. 위치 정보 데이터의 음절수에 따라서 발음 변이의 수를 조절한 결과도 전체적으로는 3 음절로 그 수를 제한한 경우, 6 음절이상 단어에서는 4음절로 제한한 경우에 가장 좋은 인식 성능을 얻을 수 있어서, 음절수에 따른 발음변이 수의 조절이 효과적임을 알 수 있었다.

• The Journal of the Acoustical Society of Korea
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• v.26 no.6
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• pp.250-258
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• 2007

Current speech recognition technology s achieved high performance with the development of hardware devices, however it is insufficient for some applications where high reliability is required, such as voice control of powered wheelchairs for disabled persons. For the system which aims to operate powered wheelchairs safely by voice in real environment, we need to consider that non-voice commands such as user s coughing, breathing, and spark-like mechanical noise should be rejected and the wheelchair system need to recognize the speech commands affected by disability, which contains specific pronunciation speed and frequency. In this paper, we propose non-voice rejection method to perform voice/non-voice classification using both YIN based fundamental frequency(F0) extraction and reliability in preprocessing. We adopted a multi-template dictionary and acoustic modeling based speaker adaptation to cope with the pronunciation variation of inarticulately uttered speech. From the recognition tests conducted with the data collected in real environment, proposed YIN based fundamental extraction showed recall-precision rate of 95.1% better than that of 62% by cepstrum based method. Recognition test by a new system applied with multi-template dictionary and MAP adaptation also showed much higher accuracy of 99.5% than that of 78.6% by baseline system.