• Journal of Korean language education
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• v.23 no.1
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• pp.219-256
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• 2012

The aim of this study is to observe the trend of discourse study in language education and analyze the main issues by investigating the literatures related to discourse in Korean language education in the last ten years. This study observed the discourse study conducted in Korean language education from the perspectives of study subject, study method and study data. Moreover, based on the results, it estimated the achievements and effectiveness of the discourse study conducted in Korean language education. The subject of discourse study was mainly dealt with discourse function, discourse pattern, discourse marker, discourse structure. In the study methods, analysis of corpus and survey were mainly used as the study methods, and spoken corpus, written corpus and semi-spoken corpus were used as study materials. In particular, the semi-spoken corpus was used at a very high rate among them. This showed that discourse study in Korean language education was mainly focused on spoken corpus study. This study divided the detailed field of Korean language education into four fields of linguistic knowledge, communication function, teaching activities and learning activities, and observed the trends of discourse study in each field. Overall, it was recognized that relatively many studies were focused on linguistic knowledge, particularly in pragmatic perspective. It can be said that the study based on discourse has a language educational effectiveness in that it is based on actual data and improves practical communication skills in the environment of various languages.

• Proceedings of the Acoustical Society of Korea Conference
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• spring
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• pp.87-90
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• 2002

This paper analyzes statistically the relationship between size and balance of text corpus by evaluation of the effect of interview sentences in language model for Korean broadcast news transcription system. Our Korean broadcast news transcription system's ultimate purpose is to recognize not interview speech, but the anchor's and reporter's speech in broadcast news show. But the gathered text corpus for constructing language model consists of interview sentences a portion of the whole, $15\%$ approximately. The characteristic of interview sentence is different from the anchor's and the reporter's in one thing or another. Therefore it disturbs the anchor and reporter oriented language modeling. In this paper, we evaluate the effect of interview sentences in language model for Korean broadcast news transcription system and analyze statistically the relationship between size and balance of text corpus by making an experiment as the same procedure according to varying the size of corpus.

• MALSORI
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• no.46
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• pp.159-174
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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.

• MALSORI
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• no.63
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• pp.101-112
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• 2007

Spoken dialog system development includes many laborious and inefficient tasks. Since there are many components such as speech recognition, language understanding, dialog management and knowledge management in a spoken dialog system, a developer should take an effort to edit corpus and train each model separately. To reduce a cost for editing corpus and training each model, we need more systematic and efficient working environment. For the working environment, we propose DialogStudio as a spoken dialog system workbench.

• The Journal of the Acoustical Society of Korea
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• v.28 no.2E
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• pp.43-50
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• 2009

To get more natural synthetic speech generated by a Korean TTS (Text-To-Speech) system, we have to know all the possible prosodic rules in Korean spoken language. We should find out these rules from linguistic, phonetic information or from real speech. In general, all of these rules should be integrated into a prosody-generation algorithm in a TTS system. But this algorithm cannot cover up all the possible prosodic rules in a language and it is not perfect, so the naturalness of synthesized speech cannot be as good as we expect. ANNs (Artificial Neural Networks) can be trained to learn the prosodic rules in Korean spoken language. To train and test ANNs, we need to prepare the prosodic patterns of all the phonemic segments in a prosodic corpus. A prosodic corpus will include meaningful sentences to represent all the possible prosodic rules. Sentences in the corpus were made by picking up a series of words from the list of PB (phonetically Balanced) isolated words. These sentences in the corpus were read by speakers, recorded, and collected as a speech database. By analyzing recorded real speech, we can extract prosodic pattern about each phoneme, and assign them as target and test patterns for ANNs. ANNs can learn the prosody from natural speech and generate prosodic patterns of the central phonemic segment in phoneme strings as output response of ANNs when phoneme strings of a sentence are given to ANNs as input stimuli.

• Journal of the Korean Institute of Intelligent Systems
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• v.14 no.3
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• pp.357-362
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• 2004

Language models are essential in predicting the next word in a spoken sentence, thereby enhancing the speech recognition accuracy, among other things. However, spoken language domains are too numerous, and therefore developers suffer from the lack of corpora with sufficient sizes. This paper proposes a method of combining two n-gram language models, one constructed from a very small corpus of the right domain of interest, the other constructed from a large but less adequate corpus, resulting in a significantly enhanced language model. This method is based on the observation that a small corpus from the right domain has high quality n-grams but has serious sparseness problem, while a large corpus from a different domain has more n-gram statistics but incorrectly biased. With our approach, two n-gram statistics are combined by extending the idea of Katz's backoff and therefore is called a dual-source backoff. We ran experiments with 3-gram language models constructed from newspaper corpora of several million to tens of million words together with models from smaller broadcast news corpora. The target domain was broadcast news. We obtained significant improvement (30%) by incorporating a small corpus around one thirtieth size of the newspaper corpus.

• Journal of Korean language education
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• v.25 no.1
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• pp.1-27
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• 2014

This study investigates how common English hedge expressions such as 'I think' and 'I guess' appear in Korean, with the aim of providing explicit explanation for English-speaking leaners of Korean. Based on a contrastive analysis of spoken English and Korean corpus, this study argues three points: Firstly, 'I guess' appears with a wider variety of modalities in Korean than 'I think'. Secondly, this study has found that Korean textbooks contain inappropriate use of registers regarding the English translations of '-geot -gat-': although these markers are used in spoken Korean, they were translated into written English. Therefore, this study suggests that '-geot -gat-' be translated into 'I think' in spoken English, and into 'it seems' in the case of written English and narratives. Lastly, the contrastive analysis has shown that when 'I think' is used with deontic modalities such as 'I think I have to', Korean use '-a-ya-get-': the use of hedge marker 'I think' with 'I have to', which shows obligation or speaker's volition turns the deontic modalities into expressions of speaker's opinion.

• Proceedings of the KSPS conference
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• 2007.05a
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• pp.311-314
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• 2007

Spoken dialog system development includes many laborious and inefficient tasks. Since there are many components such as speech recognizer, language understanding, dialog management and knowledge management in a spoken dialog system, a developer should take an effort to edit corpus and train each model separately. To reduce a cost for editting corpus and training each models, we need more systematic and efficent working environment. For the working environment, we propose DialogStudio as an spoken dialog system workbench.

• MALSORI
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• v.68
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• pp.49-63
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• 2008

This paper describes the development and assessment of a hidden Markov model (HMM) based Tagalog speech synthesis system, where Tagalog is the most widely spoken indigenous language of the Philippines. Several aspects of the design process are discussed here. In order to build the synthesizer a speech database is recorded and phonetically segmented. The constructed speech corpus contains approximately 89 minutes of Tagalog speech organized in 596 spoken utterances. Furthermore, contextual information is determined. The quality of the synthesized speech is assessed by subjective tests employing 25 native Tagalog speakers as respondents. Experimental results show that the new system is able to obtain a 3.29 MOS which indicates that the developed system is able to produce highly intelligible neutral Tagalog speech with stable quality even when a small amount of speech data is used for HMM training.

• Annual Conference on Human and Language Technology
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• 1996.10a
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• pp.145-152
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• 1996

연속음성인식 시스템을 개발하기 위해서는 언어가 갖는 문법적 제약을 이용한 언어모델이 요구된다. 문법적 규칙을 이용한 언어모델은 전문가가 일일이 문법 규칙을 만들어 주어야 하는 단점이 있다. 통계적 언어 모델에서는 문법적인 정보를 수작업으로 만들어 주지 않는 대신 그러한 모든 정보를 학습을 통해서 훈련해야 하기 때문에 이를 위해 요구되는 학습 데이터도 엄청나게 증가한다. 따라서 적은 양의 데이터로도 이와 유사한 효과를 보일 수 있는 것이 클래스에 의거한 언어 모델이다. 또 이 모델은 음성 인식과 연계시에 탐색 공간을 줄여 주기 때문에 실시간 시스템 구현에 매우 유용한 모델이다. 여기서는 자동으로 클래스를 찾아주는 알고리즘을 호텔예약시스템의 corpus에 적용, 분석해 보았다. Corpus 자체가 문법규칙이 뚜렷한 특성을 갖고 있기 때문에 heuristic하게 클래스를 준 것과 유사한 결과를 보였지만 corpus 크기가 커질 경우에는 매우 유용할 것이며, initial map을 heuristic하게 주고 그 알고리즘을 적용한 결과 약간의 성능향상을 볼 수 있었다. 끝으로 음성인식시스템과 접합해 본 결과 유사한 결과를 얻었으며 언어모델에도 음향학적 특성을 반영할 수 있는 연구가 요구됨을 알 수 있었다.