Korea - SSML_workshop.

1. 1
W3C Workshop on Internationalizing SSML
SSML Extension for Korean
Workshop : 2005/11/02 (Wed)
Sang-Jin Kim
sangjin@icu.ac.kr

2. 2
Contents
 Characteristic of Korean
 SSML Extension for Chinese Characters in Korean
 SSML Extension for Homograph Words in Korean
 Conclusion

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Characteristic of Korean
 Hangul, The Korean Character
 Consists of forty letters
 21 vowels (including 13 diphthongs), and 19 consonants
 Syllable
 V, CV, VC, and CVC (C : consonant, V : vowel)
 Eojeol, the word phrase is different from a phrase in English
 Completely different from Japanese except for the grammatical
structure
 Completely different from Chinese although Korean has
borrowed many Chinese words and some Chinese characters

4. 4
Characteristic of Korean
 Vowels in Hangul, The Korean Character
 Monothong vowels classified according to tongue position and
height

5. 5
Characteristic of Korean
 Consonants in Hangul, The Korean Character
 Consonants classified according to place and manner of
articulation

6. 6
SSML Extension for
Chinese Characters in Korean
 Chinese Characters in Korean
 Present Korean and Japanese use many Chinese Characters
 But, pronunciation of the characters is different
 Same characters is represented differently according to the
country
 These simplified characters are not used in Korea

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SSML Extension for
Chinese Characters in Korean
 Chinese Characters in Korean
 We can write text only with Korean characters
 Not unusual to use Chinese characters as well
 The pronunciation of the are exactly same

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SSML Extension for
Chinese Characters in Korean
 Chinese Characters in Korean TTS
 The input text for text-to-speech(TTS) system has to be
converted into a phonetic list
 If Chinese characters are mixed with Korean characters, they
have to be substituted to Korean
 We don’t use all Chinese characters, rather there is a
frequently-used-Chinese-character-list recommended by our
Korean government and its size is 2000
 We need to utilize this list and their pronunciations in the
Korean TTS system, since the pronunciations of them are
different from Chinese and Japanese

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SSML Extension for
Chinese Characters in Korean
 SSML Extension for Chinese Characters in Korean
 Same characters but different pronunciation in Chinese
Characters according to the country
<lexicon xml:lang=”ko” uri=”http://www.multilingual.org/lexicon.file”>
<lexicon xml:lang=”ko-CN” uri=”http://www.multilingual.org/Chinese_lexicon_freq_KR.file”>
<lexicon xml:lang=”ko-CN” uri=”http://www.multilingual.org/Chinese_lexicon_technical.file”>
<lexicon xml:lang=”ja-KR” uri=”http://www.multilingual.org/Chinese_lexicon_JP.file”>
<lexicon xml:lang=”cn-KR” uri=”http://www.multilingual.org/Chinese_lexicon_CN.file”>

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SSML Extension for
Homograph Words in Korean
 Homograph Words in Korean
 Same word, different pronunciation, different meaning
 The difference is “duration”

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SSML Extension for
Homograph Words in Korean
 SSML Extension for Homograph Words in Korean
 Only the difference for these words is the duration in
pronunciation
 necessary to give the duration information to a TTS system for
these kinds of words
 SSML recommendation supports “say-as” element and “sub”
element, these elements cannot handle the above problem
successfully

12. 12
SSML Extension for
Homograph Words in Korean
 SSML Extension for Homograph Words in Korean
 We suggest “tone” tag for this problem
 Attribute values for tone element are ‘long’, ‘short’ and ‘default’
would be enough for Korean.

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Conclusion
 SSML Extension for Chinese Characters in Korean
 lexicon element doesn’t support “xml:lang” tag
 We suggest xml:lang=“ko”, xml:lang=“ko-CN”, xml:lang=“ja-
KR”, xml:lang=“cn-KR” tags
 SSML Extension for Homograph Words in Korean
 “say-as” and “sub” elements cannot handle homograph
problem successfully
 We suggest “tone” element
 Attribute values, type=“long”, type=“short”, and type=“default”
would be enough for Korean