Evaluation of the KIT Lecture Translation System

Markus Müller, Sarah Fünfer, Sebastian Stüker, Alex Waibel


Abstract
To attract foreign students is among the goals of the Karlsruhe Institute of Technology (KIT). One obstacle to achieving this goal is that lectures at KIT are usually held in German which many foreign students are not sufficiently proficient in, as, e.g., opposed to English. While the students from abroad are learning German during their stay at KIT, it is challenging to become proficient enough in it in order to follow a lecture. As a solution to this problem we offer our automatic simultaneous lecture translation. It translates German lectures into English in real time. While not as good as human interpreters, the system is available at a price that KIT can afford in order to offer it in potentially all lectures. In order to assess whether the quality of the system we have conducted a user study. In this paper we present this study, the way it was conducted and its results. The results indicate that the quality of the system has passed a threshold as to be able to support students in their studies. The study has helped to identify the most crucial weaknesses of the systems and has guided us which steps to take next.
Anthology ID:
L16-1293
Volume:
Proceedings of the Tenth International Conference on Language Resources and Evaluation (LREC'16)
Month:
May
Year:
2016
Address:
Portorož, Slovenia
Venue:
LREC
SIG:
Publisher:
European Language Resources Association (ELRA)
Note:
Pages:
1856–1861
Language:
URL:
https://aclanthology.org/L16-1293
DOI:
Bibkey:
Cite (ACL):
Markus Müller, Sarah Fünfer, Sebastian Stüker, and Alex Waibel. 2016. Evaluation of the KIT Lecture Translation System. In Proceedings of the Tenth International Conference on Language Resources and Evaluation (LREC'16), pages 1856–1861, Portorož, Slovenia. European Language Resources Association (ELRA).
Cite (Informal):
Evaluation of the KIT Lecture Translation System (Müller et al., LREC 2016)
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PDF:
https://preview.aclanthology.org/ingestion-script-update/L16-1293.pdf