Effect of workspace awareness for the all-for-one-type multilingual conference support system

The all-for-one-type multilingual conference support system has been proposed to help foreigners understand the content of conferences. In our context, “all-for-one” implies that Japanese participants support the content understanding of foreigners during lectures or conferences held in Japan. Japanese participants create the summary of a conference cooperatively using the proposed system. However, the proposed system has some drawbacks. First, the system cannot overcome the problems associated with work collision between the participants working to support the audience. We believe that while the supporting participants possibly participate in the original conference support systems, work collision is relatively less of a concern in these systems because there are not many users. On the other hand, in the all-for-one-type support system, there is a high possibility of frequent work collision because many users operate at the same time. To reduce this work collision, we developed a function that takes into account the participants´ workspace, and used the same in our experiments. Second, the effect of this support on the content understanding of the Japanese participants has not been verified. Hence, we performed experiments to compare the content understanding between the participants and the audience at the conference or lecture. The following conclusions were drawn from the results of our experiments: (1) Presenting the contents inputted by each participant in real time helps reduce work collision in terms of content. (2) Using the telepointer function and color function for identifying each participant reduces the work collision in the operating objects. (3) Making summaries of the conference topics is a hard task for the participants and can lead to a poor understanding of the content.