Evaluation of the KIT Lecture Translation System

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

Unsupervised vocabulary selection for simultaneous lecture translation

In this work, we propose a novel method for vocabulary selection which enables simultaneous speech recognition systems for lectures to automatically adapt to the diverse topics that occur in educational and scientific lectures. Utilizing materials that are available before the lecture begins, such as lecture slides, our proposed framework iteratively searches for related documents on the World Wide Web and generates a lecture-specific vocabulary and language model based on the resulting documents. In this paper, we introduce a novel method for vocabulary selection where we rank vocabulary that occurs in the collected documents based on a relevance score which is calculated using a combination of word features. Vocabulary selection is a critical component for topic adaptation that has typically been overlooked in prior works. On the interACT German-English simultaneous lecture translation system our proposed approach significantly improved vocabulary coverage, reducing the out-of-vocabulary rate on average by 57.0% and up to 84.9%, compared to a lecture-independent baseline. Furthermore, our approach reduced the word error rate by up to 25.3% (on average 13.2% across all lectures), compared to a lectureindependent baseline

The anglocentric tendency in the history of information engineering

This paper examines the anglocentric nature of much writing on the history of technology, taking as an example important research results from the first half of the last century published in German and Russian in the field of information engineering. By ‘information engineering’ is meant such disciplines as electronics, telecommunications, control engineering and signal processing. The seminal German and Russian results discussed here, untranslated at the time into English, remained largely unknown in the English-speaking world

Recent Hegel Literature: The Jena Period and the Phenomenology of Spirit

This is an offprint version of the article published in Telos (1981). The version made available in Digital Common was supplied by the author and is made available with permission of the publisher, Telos Press.Publisher's Versiontru

The Origins of Phenomenology in Austro-German Philosophy. Brentano, Husserl

The development of phenomenology in nineteenth‐century German philosophy is that of a particular stream within the larger historical‐philosophical complex of Austro‐German philosophy. As the “grandfather of phenomenology” resp. the “disgusted grandfather of phenomenology,” but also as the key figure on the “Anglo‐Austrian Analytic Axis”, Brentano is at the source of the two main philosophical traditions in twentieth‐century philosophy. This chapter focuses mainly on his place in nineteenth‐century European philosophy and on the central themes and concepts in his philosophy that were determinant in the development of the philosophy of his most gifted student: Edmund Husserl. Despite the variety of stances which Brentano expressed on ontology, metaphysics, and psychology over the course of his career, the five general principles remain central to his whole philosophy throughout: they have an important place in what could be called Brentano's philosophical worldview or system. By extension, they also are essential to his conception of phenomenology