• Phonetics and Speech Sciences
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• v.7 no.2
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• pp.95-102
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• 2015

The purpose of this paper is to extract the vowel formants of the ten adult male speakers in their twenties and thirties from the Korean Corpus of Spontaneous Speech [4], also known as the Seoul corpus, and to analyze them by comparing to earlier works on the Buckeye Corpus of Conversational Speech [1] in terms of the various linguistic factors that are expected to affect the formant distribution. The vowels extracted from the Korean corpus were also compared to those of the read Korean. The results showed that the distribution of the vowel formants from the Korean corpus was very different from that of read Korean speech. The comparison with English corpus and read English speech showed similar patterns. The factors affecting the Korean vowel formants were the interviewer sex, the location of the target vowel or the syllable containing it with respect to the phrasal word or utterance and the speech rate of the surrounding words.

• Proceedings of the KSPS conference
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• 2005.11a
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• pp.63-66
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• 2005

For the Large Corpus based TTS the consistency of the speech corpus is very important. It is because the inconsistency of the speech quality in the corpus may result in a distortion at the concatenation point. And because of this inconsistency, large corpus must be tuned repeatedly One of the reasons for the inconsistency of the speech corpus is the different glottal characteristics of the speech sentence in the corpus. In this paper, we adjusted the glottal characteristics of the speech in the corpus to prevent this distortion. And the experimental results are showed.

• English Language & Literature Teaching
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• v.15 no.3
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• pp.151-170
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• 2009

Recently speech texts have been increasingly used for English education because of their various advantages as language teaching and learning materials. The purpose of this paper is to analyze speech texts in a corpus-based lexical approach, and suggest some productive methods which utilize English speaking or writing as the main resource for the course, along with introducing the actual classroom adaptations. First, this study shows that a speech corpus has some unique features such as different selections of pronouns, nouns, and lexical chunks in comparison to a general corpus. Next, from a collocational perspective, the study demonstrates that the speech corpus consists of a wide variety of collocations and lexical chunks which a number of linguists describe (Lewis, 1997; McCarthy, 1990; Willis, 1990). In other words, the speech corpus suggests that speech texts not only have considerable lexical potential that could be exploited to facilitate chunk-learning, but also that learners are not very likely to unlock this potential autonomously. Based on this result, teachers can develop a learners' corpus and use it by chunking the speech text. This new approach of adapting speech samples as important materials for college students' speaking or writing ability should be implemented as shown in samplers. Finally, to foster learner's productive skills more communicatively, a few practical suggestions are made such as chunking and windowing chunks of speech and presentation, and the pedagogical implications are discussed.

• Phonetics and Speech Sciences
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• v.7 no.2
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• pp.131-138
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• 2015

The aim of this work is to compare the vowel formants of the ten adult female speakers in their twenties and thirties from the Seoul corpus[7] with those of corresponding Korean male speakers from the same corpus and of American female speakers from the Buckeye corpus[4]. In addition, various linguistic factors that are expected affect the formant frequencies were examined to account for the distribution of the vowel formants. Formant frequencies extracted from the Seoul corpus were also compared to those from read speech. The results showed that the formant distribution of the spontaneous speech was very different from that of the read speech, while the comparison between the female and male speakers was similar in both languages. To a greater or lesser degree, the potential linguistic factors influenced the formant frequencies of the vowels.

• Asia Pacific Journal of Corpus Research
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• v.2 no.2
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• pp.1-15
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• 2021

The study aims to explore the use of metadiscourse in the Bank Negara Malaysia Governor's speeches based on Hyland's Interpersonal Model of Metadiscourse. The corpus data consist of 343 speech texts, which were extracted from the Malaysian Corpus of Financial English (MacFE), amounting to 688,778 tokens. Adopting both quantitative and qualitative approaches to data analysis the study investigates (1) the overall use of metadiscourse in the Bank Negara Governor's speech texts and (2) the functions of the most prominent metadiscourse resources used and their functions in the speech texts. The findings reveal that the Governor's speech texts to be interactional rather than interactive, revealing a rich distribution of interactional metadiscourse resources, namely engagement markers, self-mention, hedges, boosters and attitude markers throughout the texts. The interactional metadiscourse resources function to establish speaker-audience engagement and alignment of views, as well as to express degree of uncertainty and certainty and attitudes. The study concludes that the speech texts are not merely informational or propositional, but rather interpersonal.

• Phonetics and Speech Sciences
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• v.4 no.3
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• pp.75-83
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• 2012

The aims of this study were three. First, to examine the degree of deviation from dictionary prescribed symbols and actual speech made by American English speakers. Second, to measure the frequency of vowel and consonant production of American English speakers. And third, to investigate gender differences in the segmental sounds in a speech corpus. The Buckeye Speech Corpus was recorded by forty American male and female subjects for one hour per subject. The vowels and consonants in both the phonemic and phonetic transcriptions were extracted from the original files of the corpus and their frequencies were obtained using codes of a free software R. Results were as follows: Firstly, the American English speakers produced a reduced number of vowels and consonants in daily conversation. The reduction rate from the dictionary transcriptions to the actual transcriptions was around 38.2%. Secondly, the American English speakers used more front high and back low vowels while three-fourths of the consonants accounted for stops, fricatives, and nasals. This indicates that the segmental inventory has nonlinear frequency distribution in the speech corpus. Thirdly, the two gender groups produced vowels and consonants similarly even though there were a few noticeable differences in their speech. From these results we propose that English teachers consider pronunciation education reflecting the actual speech sounds and that linguists find a way to establish unmarked segmentals from speech corpora.

• Phonetics and Speech Sciences
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• v.7 no.2
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• pp.103-109
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• 2015

This paper describes the development of the Korean corpus of spontaneous speech, also called the Seoul corpus. The corpus contains the audio recording of the interview-style spontaneous speech from the 40 native speakers of Seoul Korean. The talkers are divided into four age groups; talkers in their teens, twenties, thirties and forties. Each age group has ten talkers, five males and five females. The method used to elicit and record the speech is described. The corpus containing around 220,000 phrasal words was phonemically labeled along with information on the boundaries for Korean phrasal words and utterances, which were additionally romanized. According to the test result of labeling consistency, the inter-labeler agreement on phoneme identification was 98.1% and the mean deviation on boundary placement was 9.04 msec. The corpus will be made available for free to the research community in March, 2015.

• Phonetics and Speech Sciences
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• v.4 no.1
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• pp.29-47
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• 2012

The purpose of this paper is to show how to convert the label files of the Buckeye Corpus of Spontaneous Speech [1] into Praat format and to introduce some of the Praat scripts that will enable linguists to study various aspects of spoken American English present in the corpus. During the conversion process, several types of errors were identified and corrected either manually or automatically by the use of scripts. The Praat script tools that have been developed can help extract from the corpus massive amounts of phonetic measures such as the VOT of plosives, the formants of vowels, word frequency information and speech rates that span several consecutive words. The script tools can extract additional information concerning the phonetic environment of the target words or allophones.

• ETRI Journal
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• v.45 no.1
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• pp.18-27
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• 2023

We present an English-Korean speech translation corpus, named EnKoST-C. End-to-end model training for speech translation tasks often suffers from a lack of parallel data, such as speech data in the source language and equivalent text data in the target language. Most available public speech translation corpora were developed for European languages, and there is currently no public corpus for English-Korean end-to-end speech translation. Thus, we created an EnKoST-C centered on TED Talks. In this process, we enhance the sentence alignment approach using the subtitle time information and bilingual sentence embedding information. As a result, we built a 559-h English-Korean speech translation corpus. The proposed sentence alignment approach showed excellent performance of 0.96 f-measure score. We also show the baseline performance of an English-Korean speech translation model trained with EnKoST-C. The EnKoST-C is freely available on a Korean government open data hub site.

• MALSORI
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• no.67
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• pp.181-193
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• 2008

In this paper, we propose a vocabulary coverage improvement method for embedded continuous speech recognition (CSR) using a part-of-speech (POS) tagged corpus. We investigate 152 POS tags defined in Lancaster-Oslo-Bergen (LOB) corpus and word-POS tag pairs. We derive a new vocabulary through word addition. Words paired with some POS tags have to be included in vocabularies with any size, but the vocabulary inclusion of words paired with other POS tags varies based on the target size of vocabulary. The 152 POS tags are categorized according to whether the word addition is dependent of the size of the vocabulary. Using expert knowledge, we classify POS tags first, and then apply different ways of word addition based on the POS tags paired with the words. The performance of the proposed method is measured in terms of coverage and is compared with those of vocabularies with the same size (5,000 words) derived from frequency lists. The coverage of the proposed method is measured as 95.18% for the test short message service (SMS) text corpus, while those of the conventional vocabularies cover only 93.19% and 91.82% of words appeared in the same SMS text corpus.