Evaluation of the KIT Lecture Translation System
Markus Müller, Sarah Fünfer, Sebastian Stüker, Alex Waibel · 2016
To attract many foreign students is among the goals of the Karlsruhe Institute of Technology (KIT).One obstacle to achieving this goal is the fact 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 very challenging to become proficient enough in it in order to follow such a complex communication situation as a lecture.As a solution to this problem we offer our automatic simultaneous lecture translation at KIT's lecture halls which automatically translates the German lectures into English in real time for the students.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 is high enough in order to be of use to our foreign students at KIT we have conducted a user study on the benefit of the system to its users over the course of two terms.In this paper we present this study, the way it was conducted and its results.As it turns out the results indicate that the quality of the system has passed a threshold as to be able to support students in their studies.The detailed feedback participants to the study have helped to identify the most crucial weaknesses of the systems and has guided which development steps to take next.