• The Journal of Korea Institute of Information, Electronics, and Communication Technology
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• v.13 no.3
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• pp.197-205
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• 2020

Korean language has the characteristics that the pronunciation of phoneme units such as vowels and consonants are fixed and the pronunciation associated with a notation does not change, so that foreign learners can approach rather easily Korean language. However, when one pronounces words, phrases, or sentences, the pronunciation changes in a manner of a wide variation and complexity at the boundaries of syllables, and the association of notation and pronunciation does not hold any more. Consequently, it is very difficult for foreign learners to study Korean standard pronunciations. Despite these difficulties, it is believed that systematic analysis of pronunciation errors for Korean words is possible according to the advantageous observations that the relationship between Korean notations and pronunciations can be described as a set of firm rules without exceptions unlike other languages including English. In this paper, we propose a visualization framework which shows the differences between standard pronunciations and erratic ones as quantitative measures on the computer screen. Previous researches only show color representation and 3D graphics of speech properties, or an animated view of changing shapes of lips and mouth cavity. Moreover, the features used in the analysis are only point data such as the average of a speech range. In this study, we propose a method which can directly use the time-series data instead of using summary or distorted data. This was realized by using the deep learning-based technique which combines Self-organizing map, variational autoencoder model, and Markov model, and we achieved a superior performance enhancement compared to the method using the point-based data.