NTCIR

The Seventeenth NTCIR conference (NTCIR-17) would like to welcome all of you who are interested in and/or working on information access research. This sesquiannual event was first held in 1999, and has grown steadily ever since. About 303 people from 35 different countries attended NTCIR-16 and we are hoping that the event will be even more successful this time. NTCIR covers diverse information access tasks including, but not limited to, information retrieval, question answering, text summarisation and text mining, with an emphasis on East Asian languages and English.

At the NTCIR-17 conference, we will hear exciting reports from the following tasks:

- FairWeb-1 ("FairWeb-1")
- Fine-grained Argument Understanding in Financial Analysis ("FinArg-1")
- Medial Natural Language Processing for Social media and Clinical texts ("MedNLP-SC")
- Personal Lifelog Organisation & Retrieval ("Lifelog-5")
- QA Lab for Political Information-4 ("QA Lab-PoliInfo-4")
- Resource Transfer Based Dense Retrieval ("Transfer")
- Session Search ("SS-2")
- Unbiased Learning to Rank Evaluation Task 2 ("ULTRE-2")
- Understanding of non-Financial Objects in Financial Reports ("UFO")

While the NTCIR conference is a venue for task participants and organisers to discuss the official task results, open problems and future task designs, our door is open even to those who did not participate in any of the NTCIR-17 tasks. For the previous Conference, among them about half were researchers participated in the "task(s)" set by NTCIR, and others contributed to fruitful discussion.

NTCIR-17 will be co-located with EVIA 2023. EVIA is a one-day workshop for information access researchers to present their work on evaluation methods, measures, test collections, experimental designs and so on.

We look forward to seeing you all at NII in December!

* We will also provide online participation option. Details will be announced at a later date.