抄録
The Telecommunications Advancement Organizaion (TAO) of Japan has initiated a project in which electronically available text of TV news programs is summarizad and synchronized with the speech and video automatically, then made into closed captions for the benefit of the hearing impaired people in Japan. The project started in 1996 and will end in 2001. We report the main research issues, and the result of research for each technology last year, especially developed semi-practical system for automatic production of the programs with closed caption.