NTCIR

Since 1997, the NTCIR project has promoted research efforts for enhancing Information Access (IA) technologies such as Information Retrieval (IR), Text Summarization, Information Extraction (IE), and Question Answering (QA) techniques. Its general purposes are to:

1. Offer research infrastructure that allows researchers to conduct a large-scale evaluation of IA technologies
2. Form a research community in which findings based on comparable experimental results are shared and exchanged, and
3. Develop evaluation methodologies and performance measures of IA technologies.

Collaborative works in the NTCIR allows us to create large-scale test collections that are indispensable for checking effectiveness of novel IA techniques. In addition, in the process of the collaboration, it is expected that deep insight into research problems is successfully shared among researchers.

In particular, the NTCIR-16 focuses on two topics on IA technology mainly;

1. IR: Traditional and beyond (DialEval-2, WWW-4, DataSearch-2, Lifelog-4, ULTRE, Session Search, RCIR)
2. NLP: Deep language understanding in specialized domains such as finance, politics and medical treatment (FinNum-3, QA Lab-PoliInfo-3, Real-MedNLP)

We sincerely hope that NTCIR-16 will be beneficial to all research groups who consider their participation to advance their research and enjoy their research.