Effects of All-for-One-Type Support in Multilingual Conference Support System

For foreign students attending lectures held in a language other than their own, there is a limit to the amount of information they are able to retain. An "all-for-one" multilingual conference system has been developed that provides support for such students. "All-for-one" means that native speakers support the presence of foreign students, and in this system, assistance is provided by more than one helper at a time. Because the effects of the "all-for-one" format have not yet been verified, we performed an experiment to test the system, and compared the results of assistance by a single supporter to that of four supporters. We draw the following conclusions from the results of the experiment: (1) The content summaries in the all-for-one format, written by four assistants, yielded twice as many characters as those written by one assistant. (2) The number of text operations performed by each of four assistants was fewer than those performed by the assistant working alone. All-for-one support may hence reduce assistant workload. (3) Although all-for-one support can reduce the workload of an assistant, his or her comprehension of the material may be less developed than that of a single supporter.