Participation is invited from anyone interested in research on information access technologies and evaluation of them, such as retrieval of various document genres, cross-lingual information retrieval of Asian languages, question answering and cross-lingual information access. NTCIR Workshops are periodical event which are held once per one and half years.

The registration for NTCIR-9 Task Participation has just started.
Please visit: http://research.nii.ac.jp/ntcir/ntcir-9/

<Evaluation Tasks>
NTCIR-9 Task Selection Committee has selected the following four Core Tasks and three Pilot Tasks.

CORE TASKS

• [Intent] Intent (with One-Click Access)
  <http://www.thuir.org/intent/ntcir9/>
  - Subtopic mining subtask: given a query, list the different possible intents (senses or aspects).
  - Ranking subtask: selectively diversify web search results.
  - One Click Access (�g1CLICK�h) subtask:
  <http://www.thuir.org/1click/ntcir9/>
  For each web search query, return an X-byte text, not a list of URLs, in order to satisfy the user immediately.

• [RITE] Recognizing Inference in Text
  <http://artigas.lti.cs.cmu.edu/rite/>
  - Binary classification subtask: Judge whether Text1 entails Text2 or not.
  - Multi-class classification subtask: Judge whether (1) Text1 entails Text2; (2) Text2 entails Text1; (3) Text1 and Text2 are equivalent; (4) Text1 and Text2 are contradictory; or (5) Text1 and Text2 are independent of each other.
  - RITE4QA: extrinsic evaluation of binary classification in the context of factoid question answering.

• [GeoTime] Geotemporal information retrieval
  http://metadata.berkeley.edu/NTCIR-GeoTime/
  - Document retrieval for WHEN and WHERE questions

• [SpokenDoc] IR for Spoken Documents
  <http://www.cl.ics.tut.ac.jp/~sdpwg/index.php?ntcir9>
  - Spoken term detection subtask: find the position of a given query term within spontaneous speech data.
  - Spoken document retrieval subtask: retrieve relevant passages from spontaneous speech data.

PILOT TASKS

• [CrossLink] Cross-lingual Link Discovery
  <http://ntcir.nii.ac.jp/CrossLink/>
  Given an English Wikipedia page, extract anchors from its text and provide a link to the Chinese/Korean/Japanese Wikipedia page for each anchor.

• [Vis-Ex] Interactive Visual Exploration
  <http://must.c.u-tokyo.ac.jp/visex/hiki.cgi?FrontE>
  - Interactive complex question answering subtask: gather as many relevant nuggets as possible within a given time frame.
  - Summarizing trend information subtask: summarize a given time series information e.g. cabinet approval rating over a certain period.
  - Workshop: discuss and design modular evaluation for interactive information access.

• [PatentMT] Patent Machine Translation
  <http://ntcir.nii.ac.jp/PatentMT/>
  - Translate Chinese/Japanese patents in to English; and English patents into Japanese.

<Registration for NTCIR-9 Tasks>
Please visit the 'How To Participate' page:
http://research.nii.ac.jp/ntcir/ntcir-9/howto.html

<Important Dates>

20/12/2010 Task Registration Due (Extended to 20/01/2011)
05/01/2011 Document Set Release
01-05/2011 Dry Run
03-07/2011 Formal Run
22/08/2011 Evaluation Results Due
22/08/2011 Task Overview Partial Release
20/09/2011 Participant Paper Submission Due
04/11/2011 All Camera-ready Paper Copy for the Proceedings Due
06-09/12/2011 NTCIR-9 Meeting, NII, Tokyo, Japan

<Reference>

Proceedings of the past NTCIRs:
http://research.nii.ac.jp/ntcir/publication1-en.html
Photo Albums for NTCIR-8 Meeting:
http://research.nii.ac.jp/ntcir/ntcir-ws8/meeting/photos/

<NTCIR-9 Evaluation Co-Chairs>

Hideo Joho (University of Tsukuba, Japan)
Tetsuya Sakai (Microsoft Research Asia, China)

<NTCIR-9 General Co-Chairs>

Noriko Kando (National Institute of Informatics, Japan)
Tsuneaki Kato (The University of Tokyo, Japan)
Eiichiro Sumita (National Institute of Information and Communications Technology, Japan)

You are most welcome to join us!