Abstract of Master's Thesis Academic Year 2000

Summary Nowadays, one can easily get many kinds of online documents via the Internet. These documents however vary in fields and terminology, and it is not necessarily true that these documents are composed only of understandable words or phrases. Therefore, we have come up with a solution to assist word/phrase understanding by transforming online documents into more understandable ones. To accomplish this, we have developed a system, in which anyone can attach extra information called annotations to online documents, and view the documents through proxy servers, which convert or paraphrase the documents based on the annotations. Since attaching extra information to all expressions that might be difficult seems costly, our system has a mechanism, by which ordinary viewers can tell the system which words/phrases are difficult. Based on the information, it is possible to pinpoint the items to annotate. Moreover, the system enables viewers to register definitions of the items, which will be used as dictionaries and will be useful in helping other viewers understand the document. The data collected can also be used to find similarities among online documents.