Dombesilly? Don't be silly!

Hearing aids that know how to separate words and people from each other

The Department of International Language Studies and Computational Linguistics has been granted DKK 1.5 million from the Carlsberg Foundation for a three-year research project entitled "Building Blocks of the Danish Spoken Language - lexically and cognitively”.

The telecommunications industry has also offered its expertise for this project. In this way, this technology may create new possibilities within the mobile phone area.

Technological innovation

Most of us have tried to write a text message with predictive text or spellchecker. We also know what 'handbag' means, despite the fact that we pronounce it 'hambag'. Based on this, Associate Professor Peter Juel Henrichsen has initiated a project with the purpose to develop a technology that solves the existing problems in hearing aid production.

- It's what we call the 'cocktail situation'. A hearing aid does not know the difference between words and their pronunciation. The result is that everybody speaks all at once, says Peter Juel Henrichsen.

The idea is to create a more intelligent hearing aid that knows how to distinguish the different words and the speaker.

- Our brain works with a pre-understanding of the sounds we hear. Take the phrase 'don't be silly'. It is not always pronounced as it is spelled. Someone says 'don't be silly' and others say 'dombesilly', but we all know what it means. So our brain actually inspires our research, he says.

A practical challenge

At first, the project is a theoretical research project that will work as state of the art articles for further research. Up to now, the project has focused on making the hearing aids function in practice.

- We have developed the theory and the technology. Now the challenge is to make it work, so the words are recognised at the same time as they are uttered. Our ideas have caused a lot of interest, and during this project we hope to build a foundation for a new high-tech cooperation with Danish business partners and universities.

The project group includes Postdoc Jan Heegård Petersen, new at CBS.