N TNII
Testbeds and C
Community for IInformation access R
ResearchThe 13th NTCIR (NTCIR-13)
Testbeds and Community for Information access Research

Call for Task Participation
Visit NTCIR-13 website for registration: http://research.nii.ac.jp/ntcir/ntcir-13/
Let's participate in a collaborative activity for enhancing Information Access technologies!
Development of Information Access technologies based on techniques of Information Retrieval, Natural Language Processing,and Database Management becomes increasingly more important for many applications, (e.g., providing eﬀective access toWeb resources and text archives, and analyzing big data obtained from various kinds of sensors). It is indispensable fordeveloping such technologies to experimentally evaluate them by using test collections constructed under collaborations ofmany researchers. Over the 15 years, NTCIR has been formulating the infrastructure for the evaluation, and contributing todevelopment of the Information Access technologies. A total of 70 "evaluation tasks" have been organized, attracting over880 participant research groups worldwide so far. Furthermore, over 3,700 research groups have signed up to use the NTCIR
test collections in their research. Consequently, NTCIR has been the major forum for researchers to intensively discuss theevaluation methodology of emerging information access technologies.
The thirteenth NTCIR, NTCIR-13, now calls for task participation of anyone interested in research on information accesstechnologies and their evaluation, such as retrieval from a large amount of document collections, question answering andnatural language processing. We welcome students, young researchers, professors who supervise students, researchers
working for a company, and anyone who is interested in informatics.

NTCIR-13 Tasks
Lifelog-2

Information access and enrichment task for rich multimedia lifelog data of real-world life experienceof individuals http://ntcir-lifelog.computing.dcu.ie/

MedWebLabeling and extracting disease names of Twitter message texts and disease journal texts
http://mednlp.jp/medweb/NTCIR-13/

OpenLiveQ

Question retrieval task in which participants can evaluate their systems in a production environmentof Yahoo Japan Corporationʼs community question-answering service http://www.openliveq.net/

QALab-3

Question analysis, information retrieval, information extraction and automatic summarization using
Japanese university entrance exams of "World History" http://research.nii.ac.jp/qalab/STC-2

Given a microblog post, retrieve or generate a coherent and useful response
http://ntcirstc.noahlab.com.hk/STC2/stc-cn.htm http://ntcirstc.noahlab.com.hk/STC2/stc-jp.htm

AKG

Mining potential actions of users, and predicting the properties of search queries
http://ntcirakg.github.io/index.html

ECA

Explore the cause of emotion from text http://hlt.hitsz.edu.cn/ECA.html

NAILS

Evaluating the potential of using neural signals to label image content
http://ntcir-nails.computing.dcu.ie/

WWW

Ad hoc web search is back - we will monitor progress over at least three rounds of NTCIR
http://www.thuir.cn/ntcirwww

NTCIR-13 General Schedule

Dec 15, 2016:
Jan 2017:
Jan-Mar 2017:
Mar-Jul, 2017:

Task registration due*
Dataset release*
Dry run*Formal run*Sep 1, 2017:
Oct 1, 2017:
Nov 1, 2017:
Dec 5-8, 2017:

Events with * vary across tasks. For the latest and detailed schedule, please visit each task website.

Evaluation results returnParticipant paper due
Camera-ready paper due
NTCIR-13 Conf. & EVIA 2017

NTCIR-13 Program Committee Co-Chairs: Makoto P. Kato, Yiqun Liu
NTCIR-13 General Co-Chairs:
Charles L. A. Clarke, Noriko Kando, Tetsuya Sakai

Contact (secretariat) : ntc-secretariat@nii.ac.jp

N TNII
Testbeds and C
Community for Information
Iaccess Research

Aims of NTCIR-13
NTCIR-13 mainly focuses on
three topics on IA technology:

By understanding texts
Answering complex questions

QALab

1. Answering complex questions
and queries through deep
understanding of text anduser intents
2. Mining knowledge from alarge amount of human generated data
3. Application of knowledge
extracted from big data tointelligent IA technologies

Replying to tweets

By understanding intents

Responding toComplex Questions

Search for questions

OpenLiveQ
Search for web pages

WWW

STC
Answer

Questions
Mining lifelog data
for search?

?

?

Users

Mining user actions

Data

Lifelog

for search

AKG

StoredFrom text data

From sensor data

Patients from microblogs/blogs

Relevance from brain signals

NAILS

Mining Human
Generated Data

MedWeb
Emotions and causes from news

ECA

The 12th NTCIR Conference & EVIA 2016
http://research.nii.ac.jp/ntcir/ntcir-13/•9Evaluation tasks• 47 Task organizers• 91 Research groups• 21 Countries/Regions• 236 ParticipantsContact (secretariat) : ntc-secretariat@nii.ac.jp