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Speech Information Technology & Industry Promotion Center in Korea: Activities and Directions

We will introduce current developments of language resources and efforts to promote the systematic creation and sharing of speech corpora in Korea. Recently speech information technology has developed substantially through the research and development of academia, industry and institute in Korea. However, in the country there was no national organization to manage language resources systematically and communicate with related overseas organizations. As practical uses of speech information technologies such as speech recognition and synthesis increase, difficulties arise in academic and industrial areas with respect to speech information technology, such as speech corpora and assessment for speech recognition and synthesis. Thus, in May 2001 SITEC (Speech Information Technology & Industry Promotion Center) was founded at Wonkwang University, funded by the Ministry of Commerce, Industry and Energy and the concerned companies, modeling after LDC (Linguistic Data Consortium) in the U. S, and ELRA (European Language Resources Association) in Europe. It was founded to help solve the common difficulties in the field and to manage systematic creation and distribution of speech resources in Korea. Up to now organizations and companies have constructed speech corpora individually for their own use, but now a publicly recognized organization has been founded to coordinate the activities for speech resources. This will contribute to economic management of speech corpora and application development as well as to active speech research in Korea.