Publication
Computer Assistance in Bilingual Task-Oriented Human-Human Dialogues
Sven Schmeier; Matthias Rebel; Renlong Ai
In: Proceedings of the 14th International Conference on Human-Computer Interaction. Human Computer Interaction International Conferences (HCII-2011), July 9-14, Orlando, Florida, USA, Springer, 2011.
Abstract
In 2008, the percentage of people with a migration background in
Germany had already reached more than 15% (12 Million people). Among that
15%, the ratio of seniors aged 50 years or older was 30% [1]. In most cases,
their competence of the German language is adequate for dealing with everyday
situations. However sometimes in emergency or medical situations, their
knowledge of German is not sufficient to communicate with medical
professionals and vice versa. These seniors are part of the main target group
within the German Ministry of Research and Education (BMBF) research
project SmartSenior [2] and we have developed a software system that assists
multilingual doctor-patient conversations to overcome language and cultural
barriers. The main requirements of such a system are robustness, accurate
translations in respect to context and mobility, adaptability to new languages
and topics and of course an appropriate user interface. Furthermore, we have
equipped the system with additional information to convey cultural facts about
different countries. In this paper, we present the architecture and ideas behind
the system as a whole as well as related work in the area of computer aided
translation and a first evaluation of the system.