• Speech Sciences
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• v.8 no.4
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• pp.207-214
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• 2001

This study describes the focus in nine structure types of English relative clauses (SS, SO, SP, PS, PO, PP, OS, OO, OP), classified according to the grammatical role of both the head that the relative clause modifies and the gap within the relative clause. The informants for this study are 2 middle school students, 4 high school students in four formal classroom in Korea and 2 native speakers. To obtain the accurate intonation patterns, Visi-Pitch II Model 3300 was used for data analyses. Major findings are as follows: (1) The feature of the intonation in English relative clauses showed prosodic prominence at the head, but the English learners in Korea didn't show prosodic prominence; (2) the fact that all heads have prosodic prominence says that the head in relative clauses has prosodic focus; (3) in the fact that the English learners have flat pitch in the whole sentences, the problem of intonation education is found out.

• Phonetics and Speech Sciences
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• v.6 no.4
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• pp.37-45
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• 2014

Korean wh-questions and yes-no questions have morphologically the same structure. In speech, however, two types of questions are distinguished by prosodic difference. In this study, we examined if Korean native speakers can distinguish wh-question and yes-no questions produced by Chinese Korean leaners based on the prosodic information contained in the sentences. For this purpose, we performed perception analysis, and 15 Korean native speakers participated in the perception test. The results show that two types of interrogative sentences produced by Chinese Korean leaners were not distinguished by constant pitch contours. These results reveal that Chinese Korean leaners cannot match prosodic meaning and prosodic form. The most saliant prosodic feature used perceptually by native speakers to discriminate two types of interrogative sentences is pitch difference between the F0 pick of wh-word and boundary tone.

• Speech Sciences
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• v.10 no.3
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• pp.133-144
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• 2003

The purpose of this acoustic experimental study was to investigate interrelation between prosodic features of Korean spoken language and those of Korean folk songs. The words of Changbutaryoung were spoken for analysis of spoken language by three female graduate students and the song was sung for musical features by three Kyunggi Minyo singers. Pitch contours were analyzed from sound spectrogram made by Pitch Works. Results showed that special musical voices (breaking, tinkling, vibrating, etc.) and tunes (rising, falling, level, etc) of folk song were discovered at the same place where accents of spoken language came. It appeared that, even though the patterns of pitch contour were different from each other, there was positive interrelation between prosodic features of Korean spoken language and those of Korean folk songs.

• MALSORI
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• no.61
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• pp.87-100
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• 2007

A punctuation generation system which combines prosodic information with acoustic and language model information is presented. Experiments have been conducted first for the reference text transcriptions. In these experiments, prosodic information was shown to be more useful than language model information. When these information sources are combined, an F-measure of up to 0.7830 was obtained for adding punctuation to a reference transcription. This method of punctuation generation can also be applied to the 1-best output of a speech recogniser. The 1-best output is first time aligned. Based on the time alignment information, prosodic features are generated. As in the approach applied in the punctuation generation for reference transcriptions, the best sequence of punctuation marks for this 1-best output is found using the prosodic feature model and an language model trained on texts which contain punctuation marks.

• Korean Journal of Cognitive Science
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• v.19 no.1
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• pp.89-105
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• 2008

In this paper, we suggest a rule-based system for the prediction of natural prosodic phrase breaks from Korean texts. For the implementation of the rule-based system, (1) sentence constituents are sub-categorized according to their syntactic functions, (2) syntactic phrases are recognized using the dependency relations among sub-categorized constituents, (3) rules for predicting prosodic phrase breaks are created. In addition, (4) the length of syntactic phrases and sentences, the position of syntactic phrases in a sentence, sense information of contextual words have been considered as to determine the variable prosodic phrase breaks. Based on these rules and features, we obtained the accuracy over 90% in predicting the position of major break and no break which have high correlation with the syntactic structure of the sentence. As for the overall accuracy in predicting the whole prosodic phrase breaks, the suggested system shows Break_Correct of 87.18% and Juncture Correct of 89.27% which is higher than that of other models.

• Proceedings of the Korean Society for Language and Information Conference
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• 2007.11a
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• pp.405-414
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• 2007

This paper describes a preliminary work on prosody modeling aspect of a text-to-speech system for Thai. Specifically, the model is designed to predict symbolic markers from text (i.e., prosodic phrase boundaries, accent, and intonation boundaries), and then using these markers to generate pitch, intensity, and durational patterns for the synthesis module of the system. In this paper, a novel method for annotating the prosodic structure of Thai sentences based on dependency representation of syntax is presented. The goal of the annotation process is to predict from text the rhythm of the input sentence when spoken according to its intended meaning. The encoding of the prosodic structure is established by minimizing speech disrhythmy while maintaining the congruency with syntax. That is, each word in the sentence is assigned a prosodic feature called strength dynamic which is based on the dependency representation of syntax. The strength dynamics assigned are then used to obtain rhythmic groupings in terms of a phonological unit called foot. Finally, the foot structure is used to predict the durational pattern of the input sentence. The aforementioned process has been tested on a set of ambiguous sentences, which represents various structural ambiguities involving five types of compounds in Thai.

• Journal of KIISE:Software and Applications
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• v.37 no.11
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• pp.837-844
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• 2010

Prediction of the prosodic phrase boundary is one of the most important natural language processing tasks. We propose, for the natural prediction of the Korean prosodic phrase boundary, a statistical approach incorporating efficient learning features. These new features reflect the factors that affect generation of the prosodic phrase boundary better than existing learning features. Notably, moreover, such learning features, extracted according to the hand-crafted prosodic phrase boundary prediction rule, impart higher accuracy. We developed a statistical model for Korean prosodic phrase boundaries based on the proposed new features. The results were 86.63% accuracy for three levels (major break, minor break, no break) and 81.14% accuracy for six levels (major break with falling tone/rising tone, minor break with falling tone/rising tone/middle tone, no break).

• Language and Information
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• v.14 no.2
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• pp.47-70
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• 2010

This study investigates the semantic and prosodic properties of the so-called contrastive topic. We posit two informational primitives, namely, topical feature [+-T] and focal feature [+-F], from which four different informational categories, i.e., [+T, +F], [+T, -F], [-T, +F], and [-T, -F], are yielded. It is proposed that the informational category of contrastive topic has focal property [+F] as well as topical property [+T]. Based on the semantic approach that regards the function of [+F] as identificational predication and that of [+T] as forming a semantic conditional clause, it is shown that the semantic function of contrastive topic, which is specified as [+T, +F], is the combination of these two functions, i.e., identificational predication in a semantic conditional clause. This is supported by a scrutinized exploration of the prosodic pattern of English contrastive topic.

• Proceedings of the KSPS conference
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• 2003.05a
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• pp.56-60
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• 2003

The purpose of this paper is to research voice imitation. Voice imitation changes various phonetic feature. Also, in our experimental results, voice imitation has preferential prosody difference. For imitating voice, imitators change their fundamental frequency bandwidths for the most part. Imitative speakers change their high fundamental frequencies effectively while they maintain their low fundamental frequencies. Also, excellent group is distinctly superior to common group for imitating prosodic patterns. That is, the f0 bandwidth's change and the prosodic patterns are significant in imitating voice. But the low f0 is maintain by all speakers.

• Proceedings of the Korean Society for Noise and Vibration Engineering Conference
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• 2002.11b
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• pp.762-766
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• 2002

This paper describes the emotion recognition algorithm using HMM(Hidden Markov Model) method. The relation between the mechanic system and the human has just been unilateral so far. This is the why people don't want to get familiar with multi-service robots of today. If the function of the emotion recognition is granted to the robot system, the concept of the mechanic part will be changed a lot. Pitch and Energy extracted from the human speech are good and important factors to classify the each emotion (neutral, happy, sad and angry etc.), which are called prosodic features. HMM is the powerful and effective theory among several methods to construct the statistical model with characteristic vector which is made up with the mixture of prosodic features