NTCIR Project
NTCIR-6 CLIR
(CROSS-LINGUAL INFORMATION RETRIEVAL)
Research Purpose Use of Test Collection

[JAPANESE] [NTCIR Home] [NTCIR DATA Home]


NTCIR-6 CLIR (IR Test Collection)

Test Collection

The NTCIR-6 CLIR test collection can be used for experiments of cross-lingual information retrieval between Chinese(traditional), Japanese, Korean and English (CJKE) such as

*It should be noted that document sets provided for MLIR are only CJKE.

The documents are full-text of news articles in CJK languages (except for English), which were published in Asian areas from 2000 to 2001. The test collection also includes 50 search topics in CJKE, and relevance judgement information.

NTCIR-6 CLIR task consists of STAGE1 and STAGE2, and in STAGE2, old test collections of NTCIR-3, -4 and -5 were re-used with no change. Therefore, "NTCIR-6 Test Collection" indicates a test collection created in the STAGE1.


Collection Task Document Data Task Data
Genre Filename Lang. Year # of docs Size Topics Relevance Judgement
Lang. # grades
NTCIR-6 CLIR  IR News Paper articules CIRB040r(A)  CH  2000-01 901,446   581.7 MB CJKE  50 4
Mainichi Newspaper(B)  JA  2000-01 199,681   118.8 MB CJKE  50 4
Yomiuri Newspaper(B)  JA  2000-01 658,719   343.3 MB CJKE  50 4
Hankookilbo(A)  KR  2000-01 85,250   52.1 MB CJKE  50 4
Chosunilbo(A)  KR  2000-01 135,124   88.7 MB CJKE  50 4

(A) CIRB040rAHankookilboAChosunilbo: available from NII for research purpose
(B) Mainichi Newspaper,Yomiuri Newspaper: For the non-participants, available for research purpose from other party with fee@@
EYomiuri Newspaper Japanese Article Data is available for research purpose use from Nihon Database Kaihatsu Co. Ltd (currently information is available in Japanese only). and the document records in the Data shall be converted into the NTCIR standard record format by the script yomi2ntcir.pl.
@@EREADME for Yomiuri Newspaper Japanese Article Data : http://research.nii.ac.jp/ntcir/permission/ntcir-4/script/READMEforYomiuri98+99.txt
@@ETo obtai‚Ž script yomi2ntcir.pl. Fhhttp://research.nii.ac.jp/ntcir/permission/ntcir-4/script/yomi2ntc.pl
@@EREADMEyscript yomi2ntcir.pl. zFhttp://research.nii.ac.jp/ntcir/permission/ntcir-4/script/READMEforYomiuriScript.txt
EMainichi Newspaper Japanese Article Data Full-Text Article Database CD-ROMs are available for research purpose use from Nichigai Associates and Mainichi Newspaper Co. and the document records in the CD-ROMs shall be converted into the NTCIR standard record format by the script mai2.pl.(currently information is available in Japanese only)
@@ETo obtain script mai2ntc-r.plFhttp://research.nii.ac.jp/ntcir/permission/ntcir-4/script/mai2ntc-r.pl_txt
@@EREADMEymai2ntc-r.plzhttp://research.nii.ac.jp/ntcir/permission/ntcir-4/script/READMEforMainichiScript-r.txt

Documents, Topics and Questions

@@

Document Sets

(1) List of document sets

The documents sets included in the NTCIR-6 CLIR test collection are as follows.

Doc language files No. of docs
2000 2001 Total
Chinese CIRB040r (revised)
(581.7 MB)
United Daily News (udn) 244,038 222,526 466,564
United Express (ude) 40,445 51,851 92,296
Ming Hseng News (mhn) 84,437 85,302 169,739
Economic Daily News (edn) 79,380 93,467 172,847
Total 448,300 453,146 901,446
Japanese Mainichi Newspaper 2000-2001 (118.8 MB) 99,207 100,474 199,681
Yomiuri Newspaper 2000-2001 (343.3 MB) 306,709 352,010 658,719
Total 405,916 452,484 858,400
Korean Hankookilbo 2000-2001 (52.1 MB) 40,306 44,944 85,250
Chosunilbo 2000-2001 (88.7 MB) 67,711 67,413 135,124
Total 108,017 112,357 220,374


(2) Tags used in document records

The format of each news article is consistent by using a set of tags.

Mandatory tags
<DOC> </DOC> The tag for each document
<DOCNO> </DOCNO> Document identifier
<LANG> </LANG> Language code: CH, JA, KR
<HEADLINE> </HEADLINE> Title of this news article
<DATE> </DATE> Issue date
<TEXT> </TEXT> Text of news article
Optional tags
<P> </P> Paragraph marker
<SECTION> </SECTION> Section identifier in original newspapers
<AE> </AE> Contain figures or not
<WORDS> </WORDS> Number of words in 2 bytes (for Mainichi Newspaper)


@@

Search topics

(1)List of topic files

The test collection of NTCIR-6 CLIR includes a set of topics for Chinese, Japanese Korean and English. The file names are as follows:

Language File Name
(1) Chinese NTCIR6CLIRTopicCH.txt
(2) Japanese NTCIR6CLIRTopicJA.txt
(3) Korean NTCIR6CLIRTopicKR.txt
(4) English NTCIR6CLIRTopicEN.txt

(2) A sample of topics

<TOPIC>
<NUM>013</NUM>
<SLANG>CH</SLANG>
<TLANG>EN</TLANG>
<TITLE>NBA labor dispute</TITLE>
<DESC>To retrieve the labor dispute between the two parties of the US National Basketball Association at the end of 1998 and the agreement that they reached. </DESC>
<NARR>
<REL>The content of the related documents should include the causes of NBA labor dispute, the relations between the players and the management, main controversial issues of both sides, compromises after negotiation and content of the new agreement, etc. The document will be regarded as irrelevant if it only touched upon the influences of closing the court on each game of the season.</REL>
</NARR>
<CONC>NBA (National Basketball Association), union, team, league, labor dispute, league and union, negotiation, to sign an agreement, salary, lockout, Stern, Bird Regulation.</CONC>
</TOPIC>

(3) Tags used in topics

The tags used in topic are shown as follows.

<TOPIC> </TOPIC> The tag for each topic
<NUM> </NUM> Topic identifier
<ONUM> </ONUM> Original topic ID (in NTCIR-6 STAGE1, a part of old topics for NTCIR-3 to -5 was re-used.)
<SLANG> </SLANG> Source language code: CH, EN, JA, KR
<TLANG> </TLANG> Target language code: CH, EN, JA, KR
<TITLE> </TITLE> The concise representation of information request, which is composed of noun or noun phrase.
<DESC> </DESC> A short description of the topic. The brief description of information need, which is composed of one or two sentences.
<NARR> </NARR> A much longer description of topic. The <NARR> may has three parts;
(1)<BACK>...</BACK>: background information about the topic is described.
(2)<REL>...</REL>: further interpretation of the request and proper nouns, the list of relevant or irrelevant items, the specific requirements or limitations of relevant documents, and so on are given.
(3)<TERM>...</TERM>: definition or explanation of proper nouns, scientific terms and so on.
<CONC> </CONC> The keywords relevant to whole topic.
*There are some topics that do not have <BACK>, <REL> and <TERM>.

Relevance Judgments

(1) List of judgment files

Type of run Topics Docs Relevance Judgments Files
Single Language IR (SLIR) Chinese(C) Chinese(C) CLIR6FormalRunRJ-C-Rigid.txt
CLIR6FormalRunRJ-C-Relax.txt
Japanese(J) Japanese(J) CLIR6FormalRunRJ-J-Rigid.txt
CLIR6FormalRunRJ-J-Relax.txt
Korean(K) Korean(K) CLIR6FormalRunRJ-K-Rigid.txt
CLIR6FormalRunRJ-K-Relax.txt
Bilingual IR (BLIR) C or K J CLIR6FormalRunRJ-J-Rigid.txt
CLIR6FormalRunRJ-J-Relax.txt
K or J C CLIR6FormalRunRJ-C-Rigid.txt
CLIR6FormalRunRJ-C-Relax.txt
C or J K CLIR6FormalRunRJ-K-Rigid.txt
CLIR6FormalRunRJ-K-Relax.txt
Multilingual IR (MLIR) C or J or K or E C and J and K CLIR6FormalRunRJ-CJK-Rigid.txt
CLIR6FormalRunRJ-CJK-Relax.txt

(2) Two kinds of relevance judgment file

In this test collection, four categories of relevance are used for the judgment, i.e.,"Highly Relevant," "Relevant," "Partially Relevant," and "Irrelevant." However, since the trec_eval scoring program we use adopts binary relevance, we have to decide the thresholds for the 4 categories of relevance. For the reason, we provide two kinds of relevance judgment file:
(a) "Rigid" relevance - "Highly Relevant" and "Relevant" are regarded as relevant.
(b) "Relaxed" relevance - "Highly Relevant", "Relevant" and "Partially Relevant" are regarded as relevant.

(3) Format of Relevance Judgement File

The format of a relevance judgment file is as follows:

(topic-ID) (dummy) (document-ID) (relevance judgment "0" or "1") (comment)


The followings are the procedures to obtain this NTCIR-6 CLIR test collection. The test collection and data available from NII are free of charge.

Task@data ( without document data )

Document data

Documents to submit
Application Form [txt]
The User Agreement (sent by email)


Reference

The terms of use [PDF]
Task Overview of NTCIR 6 CLIR
An Overview of NTCIR-6 CLIR

Address

NTCIR Project Office (Rm.1309)
National Institute of Informatics
2-1-2 Hitotsubashi Chiyoda-ku, Tokyo
102-8430, JAPAN

PHONE: +81-3-4212-2750
FAX: +81-3-4212-2751
Email: ntc-secretariat

Mailing List

The release of the new test collections and correction information shall be announced through the ntcir Mailing list

Notice

The test collection has been constructed and used for the NTCIR. They are usable only for the research purpose use.
The documents collection included in the test collection were provided to NII for used in NTCIR free of charge or for a fee. The providers of the document data kindly understand the importance of the test collection in the research on information access technologies and then granted the use of the data for research purpose. Please remember that the document data in the NTCIR test collection is copyrighted and has commercial value as data. It is important for our continued reliable and good relationship with the data producers/providers that we researchers must behave as a reliable partners and use the data only for research purpose under the user agreement and use them carefully not to violate any rights for them .