1 W3C Workshop on Internationalizing SSML SSML Extension for Korean Workshop : 2005/11/02 (Wed) Sang-Jin Kim

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

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

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

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

7 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

8 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

9 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

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

11 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 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.

13 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