Call for Participation

We are very glad to invite you to attend the forth NTCIR Workshop Meeting to be held on June 2-4, 2004 at NII, Tokyo, Japan.
Please come and present your experimental results and findings, and join the discussion!

The fourth NTCIR Workshop Meeting is a three days meeting. This year, all sessions are open to public and anyone interested in the research and evaluation of information access technologies like IR, QA and summarization are welcome to come and join the discussion.

All the sessions are held in English, except for the pre-meeting "introduction" session which is held on the June 1st.

The latest program is available at: http://research.nii.ac.jp/ntcir-ws4/NTCIR-4-program.pdf
The online registration is available at: http://research.nii.ac.jp/ntcir-ws4/registration_ws4.html.

*Please note that the closing date of the on-line pre-registration is the 27th June 2004, 5:00p.m. in Japan Time. Pre-registration is required to attend DAY-1 through DAY-3.

1. BACKGROUND

The NTCIR Workshop is a series of evaluation workshops designed to enhance the research in information access technologies such as information retrieval, question answering, summarization and so on by providing infrastructures for large-scale evaluation and a forum for the researchers who are interested in cross-system comparison and exchanging research ideas in informal atmosphere. The main component of the infrastructure is large-scale test collections usable for experiments.

2. TASKS

The fourth NTCIR Workshop (NTCIR-4) selected the following research areas or topics as "tasks" to be experimented and investigated:

• -Cross-Lingual Information Retrieval Task

  cross- and mono-lingual IR on Chinese, Korean, Japanese, English

  -Patent Retrieval Task

  invalidity search (search patents by patent claim) and CLIR; automatic patent map generation as a feasibility study

  -Question Answering Challenge

  1) 5 possible answers,
  2) one set of all the answers,
  3) series of questions for information gathering and browsing

  -Text Summarization Challenge

  Mutli-document summarization and challenge for automatic evaluation using a reusable test collection

  -WEB Task

  Informational retrieval, navigational retrieval, geographic, result classification

3. PROGRAM

The overview and the investigation conducted by each of the 74 participating groups from 10 different countries and areas are presented at the Meeting.
http://research.nii.ac.jp/ntcir-ws4/NTCIR-4-program.pdf

All active task participating groups present their own experimental results and findings either at oral or digital poster sessions.
Discussing what and how we shall evaluated and what we learned from the results in an informal atmosphere is one of the attractive experiences
we have through the NTCIR Workshop. We do hope you will enjoy the discussion and exchanging the research idea.

Invited Talks:

Invited talks are provided on DAY-3 (June 4). The first talk by Donna Harman introduces findings and insights of a new type of evaluation called "Reliable Information Access Workshop" held on last summer, and the second one is for Cross-Language Evaluation Forum.

Open Submission Session:

NTCIR-4 Meeting also hosts an Open Submission Session and highly selective papers are presented on afternoon of the DAY-1 (June 2).
[Main Talk] Looking for a Few Good Metrics: ROUGE and its Evaluation/Chin-Yew Lin
Evaluating ADM on a Three-level Relevance Scale Document Set from NTCIR/ Vincenzo Della Mea, Luca Di Gaspero and Stefano Mizzaro
New Performance Metrics based on Multigrade Relevance: Their Application to Question Answering/ Tetsuya Sakai
... and more!

Pre-Meeting Introductory Session."Introduction to NTCIR" 17:30-19:30 June 1:

The session is for the New Comers for NTCIR and non-task participants, and includes the introduction to NTCIR and evaluation workshop, information retrieval, question answering and summarization. Special attention will be paid to evaluation methods and test collections used in the tasks of NTCIR-4. This session (and only this session) is held in Japanese. Many of the contents of this session will be briefly described in the 'Overview of the 4th NTCIR Workshop' on the 2nd June.

4. REGISTRATION

All sessions are open for those who registered on-line.
Please register on-line on the address below. http://research.nii.ac.jp/ntcir-ws4/registration_ws4.html
Please notice that the closing date of the on-line pre-registration is the 27th June 2004 5:00 p.m. in Japan Time. Please don't miss the opportunity !

Fee:

Pre-meeting Introduction: Free (Online registration NOT required)

DAY-1 to 3: (Online registration required)

15,000- Japanese Yen for non-task participants
12,000- Japanese Yen for task participants
8,000- Japanese Yen for students (including non-task participants)

The registraion includes,

Working Notes of papers, results CD, 1 buffet Dinner, 3 lunches, 3 light refreshments in the morning (9:00-9:30) such as bagels, sandwiches, and "onigiri", a typical Japanese style light refrechment (rice-balls with salmon), etc., coffee, a formal proceedings which will be published afterwards.

5. ENQUIRY

ntcir_reg

6.NII OPEN HOUSE

NII Open House is held on June 1, the day before the NTCIR-4 Meeting. The admission is free, and you are welcome to join.
For the details, please visit http://www.nii.ac.jp/hrd/HTML/OpenHouse/index-e.html



You are most welcome!
We are looking forward to seeing you at the NTCIR-4 Meeting !