NTCIR

The National Institute of Informatics (NII) is promoting the "NTCIR (NII Testbeds and Community for Information Access Research)" project.*1 NTCIR is an initiative that operates on an 18-month cycle, during which several research tasks are selected. With the cooperation of research groups from Japan and abroad, the project aims to verify the effectiveness of new methods and construct benchmark datasets as shared research infrastructure. Through comparative studies based on this common platform, the project intensively advances research. At the end of each cycle, the NTCIR Conference is held as an international conference.

We are pleased to announce that the 18th NTCIR Conference (NTCIR-18) will be held in June 2025. The share of international participants has steadily increased with each cycle, and for NTCIR-18, over half of the participating teams are from overseas.

To support the conference—especially by assisting with travel expenses for presenters from overseas—we are seeking sponsors. Sponsors will receive various benefits depending on the sponsorship tier, such as booths at the venue and opportunities to display posters. This is a valuable opportunity to connect with students and researchers active in fields such as information retrieval and natural language processing. We sincerely invite you to consider becoming a sponsor. Please refer to the sponsorship guidelines for full details.

Sponsorship applications are open until Tuesday, May 20, 2025. If you have any specific requests regarding the sponsorship period or usage of funds, feel free to contact us. With your support, we aim to make this conference more international than ever and contribute to the advancement of information access technologies in Japan and around the world.

*1 For more information on the NTCIR project, please visit:
https://www.nii.ac.jp/research/projects/ntcir/
https://research.nii.ac.jp/ntcir/index-en.html

NTCIR (NII Testbeds and Community for Information Access Research) is a collaborative research platform where researchers from Japan and abroad share large-scale evaluation infrastructures for technologies supporting access to and understanding of information—such as information retrieval, question answering, summarization, text mining, and machine translation. Researchers build on this shared foundation to conduct, verify, and share their work. The NTCIR Conference serves as the culmination of each 18-month NTCIR Workshop cycle.

At the 18th NTCIR Workshop, the following tasks (research areas) will be presented and discussed:
• AEOLLM – Automatic Evaluation of LLMs
• FairWeb-2 – The Second Fair Web Task - Fairness-aware search and conversational systems
• FinArg-2 – Temporal Inference of Financial Arguments
• Lifelog-6 – Personal Lifelog Organisation & Retrieval Task
• MedNLP-CHAT – Medical Natural Language Processing for AI Chat
• RadNLP – Prediction of lung cancer stage from radiology reports
• Transfer-2 – Resource Transfer Based Dense Retrieval
• HIDDEN-RAD – Hidden Causality Inclusion in Radiology Report Generation
• SUSHI – Searching Unseen Sources for Historical Information
• U4 – Unifying, Understanding, and Utilizing Unstructured Data in Financial Reports

The conference will feature keynote speeches and panel discussions by world-renowned researchers, addressing future challenges in information access technologies including generative AI and large language models.

The NTCIR Conference is open to the public, and anyone interested in information access research is welcome to attend. The previous NTCIR-17 Conference attracted 245 participants from 20 countries, including many who were not involved in specific tasks, and provided a highly engaging environment for discussion.

We are seeking sponsors to support the NTCIR Conference, particularly to help fund travel expenses for students and early-career researchers from overseas. A total of 113 teams from Japan and abroad have participated in NTCIR-18, with over half being international teams composed mainly of graduate students and young researchers.

The following sponsorship tiers are available.

• Platinum Sponsor: ¥500,000
• Gold Sponsor: ¥300,000
• Silver Sponsor: ¥200,000
• Bronze Sponsor: ¥100,000

Sponsors will receive the following benefits:
• Your company name will be listed on the official NTCIR-18 website. A link to your company’s website can also be included.
• You will have the opportunity to introduce your company during the Sponsor Session.
• Complimentary conference registration will be provided (Platinum: 3 attendees, Gold: 2 attendees, Silver: 2 attendees, Bronze: 1 attendee).
• Platinum and Gold sponsors will be offered space for a sponsor booth. Silver and Bronze sponsors may display posters on shared poster boards located in the lobby. (Booths and posters will be available during the main conference period, June 11–13.)
• Platinum and Gold sponsors will have the opportunity to host a coffee break named after their company (actual cost to be covered separately; available to up to three sponsors on a first-come, first-served basis).
• For full details, please download the sponsorship materials.
  • NTCIR-18 Sponsorship Materials - Japanese(zip)
  • English version of the Sponsorship materials are available on request. Please do not hesitate to contact us.

Benefit	Sponsorship Tier
	Platinum	Gold	Silver	Bronze
	¥500,000	¥300,000	¥200,000	¥100,000
Company name and logo on website	Extra Large 60Kpic	Large 40Kpic	Medium 20Kpic	Small 10Kpic
Company introduction in Sponsor Session (June 11, video accepted)	5-minute presentation	3-minute presentation	2-minute presentation	1-minute presentation
Complimentary registration	3 persons	2 persons	2 persons	1 person
Booth or poster display (upon request)	Booth, 2 poster boards, 2 tables	Booth, 1 board, 1 table	Poster on shared board (A0)	Poster on shared board (A1 landscape)
Inclusion of flyers and small items in conference materials	[Booklet/Flyer] + small item	Flyer + small item	Flyer only
Right to host a sponsor coffee break	〇	〇

NTCIR Conference Organizing Committee
Sponsor Chair

• Hiroaki Ohshima (University of Hyogo / National Institute of Informatics, Japan)

General Co-Chairs

• Noriko Kando (National Institute of Informatics, Japan)
• Makoto P. Kato (University of Tsukuba / National Institute of Informatics, Japan)

NTCIR Secretariat

• Contact: Harada
  Email: ntc18-sponsor
  Phone: +81-3-4212-2751