• Phonetics and Speech Sciences
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• v.4 no.4
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• pp.45-52
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• 2012

The purpose of this paper is to measure the first two vowel formants of the ten young female speakers from the Buckeye Corpus of Conversational Speech [1] automatically and then to analyze various potential factors that may affect the formant distribution of the eight peripheral vowels of English. The factors that were analyzed included the place of articulation, the content versus function word information, the syllabic stress information, the location in a word, the location in an utterance, the speech rate of the three consecutive words, and the word frequency in the corpus. The results indicate that the overall formant patterns of the female speakers were similar to those of earlier works. The effects of the factors on the realization of the two formants were also similar to those from the male speakers with minor differences.

• The Journal of the Acoustical Society of Korea
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• v.18 no.7
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• pp.10-16
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• 1999

In this paper, we propose a concatenation-based speech synthesizer using CVC(consonant-vowel-consonant) speech segments extracted from an undesigned continuous speech corpus. Natural synthetic speech can be generated by a proper modelling of coarticulation effects between phonemes and the use of natural prosodic variations. In general, CVC synthesis unit shows smaller acoustic degradation of speech quality since concatenation points are located in the consonant region and it can properly model the coarticulation of vowels that are effected by surrounding consonants. In this paper, we analyze the characteristics and the number of required synthesis units of 4 types of speech synthesis methods that use CVC synthesis units. Furthermore, we compare the speech quality of the 4 types and propose a new synthesis method based on the most promising type in terms of speech quality and implementability. Then we implement the method using the speech corpus and synthesize various examples. The CVC speech segments that are not in the speech corpus are substituted by demonstrate speech segments. Experiments demonstrate that CVC speech segments extracted from about 100 Mbytes continuous speech corpus can produce high quality synthetic speech.

• Journal of the Korea Academia-Industrial cooperation Society
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• v.14 no.8
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• pp.3992-3998
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• 2013

This paper is related to the method of adding a emotional speech corpus to a high-quality large corpus based speech synthesizer, and generating various synthesized speech. We made the emotional speech corpus as a form which can be used in waveform concatenated speech synthesizer, and have implemented the speech synthesizer that can be generated various synthesized speech through the same synthetic unit selection process of normal speech synthesizer. We used a markup language for emotional input text. Emotional speech is generated when the input text is matched as much as the length of intonation phrase in emotional speech corpus, but in the other case normal speech is generated. The BIs(Break Index) of emotional speech is more irregular than normal speech. Therefore, it becomes difficult to use the BIs generated in a synthesizer as it is. In order to solve this problem we applied the Variable Break[3] modeling. We used the Japanese speech synthesizer for experiment. As a result we obtained the natural emotional synthesized speech using the break prediction module for normal speech synthesize.

• MALSORI
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• v.68
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• pp.115-126
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• 2008

In this paper, we propose a vocabulary coverage improvement method for embedded continuous speech recognition (CSR) using knowledgebase. A vocabulary in CSR is normally derived from a word frequency list. Therefore, the vocabulary coverage is dependent on a corpus. In the previous research, we presented an improved way of vocabulary generation using part-of-speech (POS) tagged corpus. We analyzed all words paired with 101 among 152 POS tags and decided on a set of words which have to be included in vocabularies of any size. However, for the other 51 POS tags (e.g. nouns, verbs), the vocabulary inclusion of words paired with such POS tags are still based on word frequency counted on a corpus. In this paper, we propose a corpus independent word inclusion method for noun-, verb-, and named entity(NE)-related POS tags using knowledgebase. For noun-related POS tags, we generate synonym groups and analyze their relative importance using Google search. Then, we categorize verbs by lemma and analyze relative importance of each lemma from a pre-analyzed statistic for verbs. We determine the inclusion order of NEs through Google search. The proposed method shows better coverage for the test short message service (SMS) text corpus.

• Asia Pacific Journal of Corpus Research
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• v.2 no.1
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• pp.13-22
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• 2021

The present study employed an analytical framework that is characterised by a synthesis of quantitative and qualitative analyses with a specially designed computer software SpeechActConc to examine speech acts in business communication. The naturally occurring data from the audio recordings and the prosodic transcriptions of the business sub-corpora of the HKCSE (prosodic) are manually annotated with a speech act taxonomy for finding out the frequency of fillers, the co-occurring patterns of fillers with other speech acts, and the linguistic realisations of fillers. The discoursal function of fillers to sustain the discourse or to hold the floor has diverse linguistic realisations, ranging from a sound (e.g. 'uhuh') and a word (e.g. 'well') to sounds (e.g. 'um er') and words, namely phrase ('sort of') and clause (e.g. 'you know'). Some are even combinations of sound(s) and word(s) (e.g. 'and um', 'yes er um', 'sort of erm'). Among the top five frequent linguistic realisations of fillers, 'er' and 'um' are the most common ones found in all the six genres with relatively higher percentages of occurrence. The remaining more frequent realisations consist of clause ('you know'), word ('yeah') and sound ('erm'). These common forms are syntactically simpler than the less frequent realisations found in the genres. The co-occurring patterns of fillers and other speech acts are diverse. The more common co-occurring speech acts with fillers include informing and answering. The findings show that fillers are not only frequently used by speakers in spontaneous conversation but also mostly represented in sounds or non-linguistic realisations.

• Phonetics and Speech Sciences
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• v.10 no.2
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• pp.7-14
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• 2018

The paper investigates the acoustic characteristics of English fricatives in the TIMIT corpus, with a special focus on the role of voicing in rendering fricatives in American English. The TIMIT database includes 630 talkers and 2,342 different sentences, and comprises more than five hours of speech. Acoustic analyses are conducted in the domain of spectral and temporal properties by treating gender, voicing, and place of articulation as independent factors. The results of the acoustic analyses revealed that acoustic signals interact in a complex way to signal the gender, place, and voicing of fricatives. Classification experiments using a multiclass support vector machine (SVM) revealed that 78.7% of fricatives are correctly classified. The majority of errors stem from the misclassification of /θ/ as [f] and /ʒ/ as [z]. The average accuracy of gender classification is 78.7%. Most errors result from the classification of female speakers as male speakers. The paper contributes to the understanding of the effects of voicing and gender on fricatives in a large-scale speech corpus.

• Phonetics and Speech Sciences
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• v.7 no.3
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• pp.65-72
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• 2015

The purpose of this study is to extract the first two vowel formant frequencies of the forty speakers from the Seoul corpus[8] and to compare them by the age and sex. The results showed that the vowel formants showed similar patterns between male and female speakers. All the vowels in each age group and all the age groups in each vowel had main effects on either of the formant frequencies. Whereas in English, the vowel space of the older age group moved slightly to the upper right side relative to the younger group, the location of the vowel spaces of the Korean vowels were not as consistent.

• Proceedings of the KSPS conference
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• 2003.05a
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• pp.12-20
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• 2003

K-SEC(Korean-Spoken English Corpus) is a kind of speech database that is being under construction by the authors of this paper. This article discusses the needs of the K-SEC from various academic disciplines and industrial circles, and it introduces the characteristics of the K-SEC design, its catalogues and contents of the recorded database, exemplifying what are being considered from both Korean and English languages' phonetics and phonologies. The K-SEC can be marked as a beginning of a parallel speech corpus, and it is suggested that a similar corpus should be enlarged for the future advancements of the experimental phonetics and the speech information technology.

• Proceedings of the KSPS conference
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• 2002.11a
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• pp.27-32
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• 2002

In this paper it is discussed what should be taken into consideration with respect to segmentation and labeling in creation of speech corpus. What levels of annotation and what kind of contents should be included, what kind of acoustic information is checked for in segmentation, etc are discussed.

• Phonetics and Speech Sciences
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• v.6 no.3
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• pp.139-145
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• 2014

The paper describes methods of conducting vowel analysis from a large-scale corpus with the aids of forced alignment and optimal formant ceiling methods. 'Read Style Corpus of Standard Korean' is used for building the forced alignment system and a subset of the corpus for the processing and extraction of features for vowel analysis based on optimal formant ceiling. The results of the vowel analysis are reliable and comparable to the results obtained using traditional analytical methods. The findings indicate that the methods adopted for the analysis can be extended and be used for more fine-grained analysis without time-consuming manual labeling without losing accuracy and reliability.