• Journal of the Korea Convergence Society
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• v.12 no.4
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• pp.369-375
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• 2021

The study explores the kinds of emotions freshmen in South Korea universities experience. Specifically, the study examines their emotional experiences on level-differentiated classes, team-teaching by native speakers and Korean professors, and communicative activities. 327 freshmen participated in the survey based on 'Academic Emotions Questionnaire (AEQ)' and the statistical results are as follows: Firstly, research showed that the participants in advanced classes feel higher negative emotions such as 'worries' and 'boredom' than those of beginner and intermediated classes (P < .05). Secondly, participants feel higher level of 'fun', 'satisfaction' and lower level for 'boredom' in the native speaker classes than those of Korean professors (P < .001). Thirdly, participants feel games are the most 'fun' and 'satisfying', while presentations are viewed as the most 'worrying' and 'boring' among the communicative activities (P < .001). Finally, the pedagogical implications and suggestions are discussed.

• Phonetics and Speech Sciences
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• v.12 no.4
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• pp.73-80
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• 2020

In this study, a method for measuring the jitter component in continuous speech is presented. In the conventional jitter measurement method, pitch variabilities are commonly measured from the sustained vowels. In the case of continuous speech, such as a spoken sentence, distortion occurs with the existing measurement method owing to the influence of prosody information according to the sentence. Therefore, we propose a method to reduce the pitch fluctuations of prosody information in continuous speech. To remove this pitch fluctuation component, a curve representing the fluctuation is obtained via polynomial interpolation for the pitch track in the analysis interval, and the shift is removed according to the curve. Subsequently, the variability of the pitch frequency is obtained by a method of measuring jitter from the trajectory of the pitch from which the shift is removed. To measure the effects of the proposed method, parameter values before and after the operations are compared using samples from the Kay Pentax MEEI database. The statistical analysis of the experimental results showed that jitter components from the continuous speech can be measured effectively by proposed method and the values are comparable to the parameters of sustained vowel from the same speaker.

• KSII Transactions on Internet and Information Systems (TIIS)
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• v.14 no.12
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• pp.4849-4865
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• 2020

The traditional roles of leaders are to influence members and motivate them to achieve shared goals in organizations. However, leaders such as top managers and chief executive officers, in practice, do not always directly meet or influence other company members. In fact, they tend to have the greatest impact on their members through formal speeches, company procedures, and the like. As such, official speech is directly related to the motivation of company employees. In an official speech, not only the contents of the speech, but also the voice characteristics of the speaker have an important influence on listeners, as the different vocal characteristics of a person can have different effects on the listener. Therefore, according to the voice characteristics of a leader, the cognition of the members may change, and, the degree to which the members are influenced and motivated will be different. This study identifies how members may perceive a speech differently according to the different voice characteristics of leaders in formal speeches. Further, different perceptions about voices will influence members' cognition of the leader, for example, in how trustworthy they appear. The study analyzed recorded speeches of leaders, and extracted features of their speaking style through digital speech signal analysis. Then, parameters were extracted and analyzed by the time domain, frequency domain, and spectrogram domain methods. We also analyzed the parameters for use in Natural Language Processing. We investigated which leader's voice characteristics had more influence on members or were more effective on them. A person's voice characteristics can be changed. Therefore, leaders who seek to influence members in formal speeches should have effective voice characteristics to motivate followers.

• The Southeast Asian review
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• v.23 no.3
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• pp.135-179
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• 2013

This study explores the study experiences of Southeast Asian students at a reputable Korean private university in Seoul. In particular, this study focuses on difficulties and coping strategies of both non-native speaker of English and native-speakers of English who are working for their undergraduate or postgraduate degrees. Interviews of fourteen students from five Southeast Asian countries were collected and analyzed by NVivo 9. Thematic analysis result shows that many students, particularly non-native speakers of English, had much more difficulties than their counterparts, in contemporary Korean university context, where internationalization indices-driven strategies including expanding courses conducted in English language. Also, this study observes and documents contrasting patterns of different degree of difficulties experienced by students, depending on their degree levels and majors. Undergraduate students in science and engineering majors had the greatest degree of difficulties among all. In contrast, their graduate counterparts seem to have less difficulties. This might be related to the fact that graduate students in science and engineering majors are mostly working with their peers in their own labs, which provides institutional support. Coping strategies of students show that international students, facing unfavorable or unfriendly treatments by their Korean peers, developed innovative strategies, including using the internet technology to catch up with the classes that they could not fully understand. As a whole, adaptation process of international students do not seem to be passive or one-way. This study also provides policy implications for international students, particularly, who can be categorized as linguistic and ethnic minorities.

• The Journal of the Korea Contents Association
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• v.21 no.1
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• pp.572-578
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• 2021

The purpose of this study was to verify the impact of cognitive and emotional factors on artificial intelligence speakers on the intention of using artificial intelligence speakers. The method for this study was online surveys of people with physical disability. The recognition and necessity of artificial intelligence speakers were also identified, the perceived intimacy, joy, and intention to use them, and a multiple linear regression analysis was conducted to check the influence of each variable on the intention of the disabled to use artificial intelligence speakers. This study have shown that the perceived enjoyment of AI speakers in people with disabilities has shown a significant static effect on their intended use. However, the recognition and necessity of artificial intelligence speakers of the physically handicapped, as well as the perceived intimacy, do not have a statistically significant impact on the intention of using artificial intelligence speakers, according to the analysis. The results of this study suggest that it is necessary to strengthen the elements of enjoyment in order to improve the intention of the disabled to use artificial intelligence speakers, and it is meaningful in that it provides basic data to develop artificial intelligence products and customized services for people with disabilities.

• Journal of the Korea Society of Computer and Information
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• v.26 no.7
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• pp.57-64
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• 2021

In this paper, we propose and test the efficacy of an easy-to-use user location certification system for public places that relies on frequencies outside the audible range for humans. The inaudible frequencies come in signal frequency between 18-20 kHz and are generated by general audio speaker. After an individual's smart device detects the signal frequency, it sends the frequency value, user's personal ID, and user's location to a system server that certifies the user's visit location currently. The system server then saves a user visit record and categorizes it by individual. To show the usefulness of this proposed system, we developed a user visit certification application for smart devices linked to a system server. We then conducted a user visit certification experiment using the proposed system, with the result showing 99.6% accuracy. For a comparison, we then held a user visit certification experiment using a QR code, which confirmed that our proposed system performs better than QR code location certification. This proposed system can thus provide restaurants and other facilities reliable user contact tracing and electronic visitor access lists in the age of COVID-19.

• Journal of Platform Technology
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• v.8 no.4
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• pp.20-28
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• 2020

In this paper, a voice, object, and optical character recognition platform including voice recognition-based smart wearable devices, smart devices, and web AI servers was proposed as an appropriate technology to help the visually impaired to live independently by learning the life cycle of the visually impaired in advance. The wearable device for the visually impaired was designed and manufactured with a reverse neckband structure to increase the convenience of wearing and the efficiency of object recognition. And the high-sensitivity small microphone and speaker attached to the wearable device was configured to support the voice recognition interface function consisting of the app of the smart device linked to the wearable device. From experimental results, the voice, object, and optical character recognition service used open source and Google APIs in the web AI server, and it was confirmed that the accuracy of voice, object and optical character recognition of the service platform achieved an average of 90% or more.

• Journal of Digital Convergence
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• v.19 no.7
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• pp.209-215
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• 2021

This study is a system development for voice information protection equipment in major meetings and places requiring security. Security performance and stability were secured with information leakage prevention technology through generation of false noise and ultrasonic waves. The cutoff frequency band for blocking the leakage of voice information, which has strong straightness due to the nature of the radio wave to the recording prevention module, blocks the wideband frequency of 20~20,000Hz, and the deception jamming technology is applied to block the leakage of voice information, greatly improving the security. To solve this problem, we developed a system that blocks the recording of a portable smartphone using a battery, and made the installation of a separate device smaller and lighter so that customers do not recognize it. In addition, it is necessary to continuously study measures and countermeasures for efficiently using the output of the anti-recording speaker for long-distance recording prevention.

• The Journal of Korean Institute of Information Technology
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• v.17 no.4
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• pp.131-136
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• 2019

People with compromised visual ability suffer from many inconveniences in daily life, such as distinguishing colors, identifying currency notes and realizing the atmospheric temperature. Therefore, to assist the visually impaired people, we propose a system by utilizing optical and infrared cameras. In the proposed system, an optical camera is used to collect features related to colors and currency notes while an infrared camera is utilized to get temperature information. The user is enabled to select the desired service by pushing the button and the appreciate voice information are provided through the speaker. The device can distinguish 16 kinds of colors, four different currency notes, and temperature information in four steps and the current accuracy is around 90%. It can be improved further through block-wise input image, machine learning, and a higher version of the infrared camera. In addition, it will be attached to the stick for easy carrying and to use it more conveniently.

• Phonetics and Speech Sciences
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• v.12 no.4
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• pp.63-71
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• 2020

Speech recognition is one of the areas actively commercialized using deep learning and machine learning techniques. However, the majority of speech recognition systems on the market are developed on data with limited diversity of speakers and tend to perform well on typical adult speakers only. This is because most of the speech recognition models are generally learned using a speech database obtained from adult males and females. This tends to cause problems in recognizing the speech of the elderly, children and people with dialects well. To solve these problems, it may be necessary to retain big database or to collect a data for applying a speaker adaptation. However, this paper proposes that a new end-to-end speech recognition method consists of an acoustic augmented recurrent encoder and a transformer decoder with linguistic prediction. The proposed method can bring about the reliable performance of acoustic and language models in limited data conditions. The proposed method was evaluated to recognize Korean elderly and children speech with limited amount of training data and showed the better performance compared of a conventional method.