What is NTCIR
About NTCIR
NTCIR (NII Testbeds and Community for Information access
Research) is a project aimed at advancing information access
technologies.
It is an international project that forms a forum where
researchers from around the world share large-scale evaluation
infrastructure for accessing desired information from vast
amounts of data, supporting the understanding and utilization
of information. Researchers conduct their studies, verify and
compare results, and learn from each other on this common
platform.
NTCIR operates on approximately 18-month cycles. In each cycle, several evaluation tasks are selected, and about 150 research institutions and organizations from around the world collaborate to verify the effectiveness of new methods and build benchmark datasets as research infrastructure. At the end of each cycle, an international conference is held.
At a Glance
Numbers
* Test Collection Users as of FY2023; Countries & Regions and Participating Teams are from NTCIR-18 data
Goals of NTCIR
Aims
Since 1997, the NTCIR project has been promoting research activities to advance information access technologies such as information retrieval, document summarization, information extraction, and question answering. Our overall goals are:
- Providing research infrastructure that enables large-scale evaluation of information access technologies
- Forming a research community where insights from comparable experimental results are shared among researchers
- Establishing evaluation methods and metrics for various information access technologies
Through collaboration among multiple researchers at NTCIR, it becomes possible to build large-scale test collections essential for verifying the effectiveness of new information access technologies. Furthermore, through cooperation at NTCIR, deep insights into research subjects are expected to be shared among researchers.
20 Years of NTCIR
History
Evaluating Information Retrieval and Access Tasks: NTCIR's
Legacy of Research Impact
(The Information Retrieval Series)
This book focuses on the tasks that NTCIR pioneered ahead of the
rest of the world within the first 20 years of its history. It
discusses what was done in NTCIR, how it was done, and the
impact it has had.
For example, in several chapters, you can see the early seeds of
what would eventually grow into search engines that provide
access to content on the World Wide Web, today's smartphones
that can tailor their displays to their owners' needs, and smart
speakers that enrich life at home and on the go.
Last Modified: 2026-01-22