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Despite much talk about the fusion of broadcasting and the Internet, no technology has been established for fusing web and TV program content. In this paper, we propose ways to transform web content into TV-program-type content as a first step towards the fusion of these media. Our transformation method is based on two criteria -the transmitted information and the dialogue among character agents. The method deals with both an audio component and a visual component. By combining these techniques, we can transform web content into various forms of TV-programtype content depending on the user's aims. We present three different prototype systems, u-Pav which reads out the entire text of web content and presents image animation, Web2TV which reads out the entire text of web content and presents character agent animation, and Web2Talkshow which presents keyword-based dialogue and character agent animation. These prototype systems enable users to watch web content in the same way, they watch a TV program.

Abstract. Our proposed "Language Grid" infrastructure supports multilingual communication by combining in new way language resources, such as machine translators, morphological analyzers, and dictionaries specific to user communities. We developed the Language Grid as a language infrastructure on the Internet. The Language Grid enables user communities to combine two or more machine translators and their community dictionaries by workflows, and to easily create new multilingual services specific to the communities. Because the quality of language services is not often defined, however, we need to confirm that the created multilingual service is really useful. We need to extend the process of general usability testing to the multilingual environment. For example, cooperation between user communities and language grid providers can significantly improve the accuracy of machine translation: it turns out that machine translations can be useful for interactive communication in the field of inter-cultural collaboration.

We propose a new way of browsing bilingual web sites through concurrent browsing with automatic similarcontent synchronization and viewpoint retrieval facilities. Our prototype browser system is called the Bilingual Comparative Web Browser (B-CWB) and it concurrently presents bilingual web pages in a way that enables their contents to be automatically synchronized. The B-CWB allows users to browse multiple web news sites concurrently and compare their viewpoint of news articles written in different languages (English and Japanese). Our viewpoint retrieval is based on similar and different detection. We described categorizing pages in terms of viewpoint: the entire similarity, the content difference, and subject difference. Content synchronization means that user operation (scrolling or clicking) on one web page does not necessarily invoke the same operations on the other web page to preserve similarity of content between the multiple web pages. For example, scrolling a web page may invoke passage-level viewpoint retrieval on the other web page. Clicking a web page (and obtaining a new web page) invokes page-level viewpoint retrieval within the other site's pages through the use of an English-Japanese dictionary.