http://research.nii.ac.jp/ntcir/ntcir-12/

The 12th NTCIR Conference
Evaluation of Information Access Technologies
NII Testbeds and Community for Information access Research

Call for Participation to the NTCIR-12 Kick-Off Event
27th February (Fri), 2015, 13:30- （English Session） 15:15- （Japanese Session）
http://research.nii.ac.jp/ntcir/ntcir-12/kickoff.html

Let's participate in a collaborative activity for enhancing Information Access technologies!
Development of Information Access technologies based on techniques of Information Retrieval, NaturalLanguage Processing or Database Management becomes increasingly more important for many applications,(e.g., providing effective access from mobile computers to Web resources or analyzing big data). It is
indispensable for developing such technologies to experimentally evaluate them by using test collections
constructed under collaborations of many researchers. Over the 15 years, NTCIR have been formulating theinfrastructure for the evaluation, and contributing to development of the Information Access technologies. A
total of 61 "evaluation tasks" have been organized, attracting over 790 participant research groups
worldwide so far. Furthermore, over 2,700 research groups have signed up to use the NTCIR test collectionsin their research. Consequently, NTCIR has been the major forum for researchers to intensively discuss theevaluation methodology of emerging information access technologies.
As some details have been finalized for NTCIR-12, we would like to hold an event to introduce theNTCIR-12 and exciting new evaluation tasks. Are you young researchers in Information Access area, faculty
members who have (many) students to supervise, researchers in industry, or simply interested inInformatics? Anyone is welcome for the event! Join us to share the advance of the state of the artInformation Access research and development!

*** NTCIR-12 Kick-Off Event ***- Date/Time: 27th February (Fri), 2015 From 13:30 p.m. To 16:45 p.m.

(13:30-15:00 English Session) (15:15-16:45 Japanese Session, same as English Session)- Location: Room 1901&1902, on the 19th floor,
National Center of Science, National Institute of Informatics (http://www.nii.ac.jp/access/)- Opening time: 13:15- Fees: Free (No registration is required)- Twitter: http://twitter.com/ntcir* Program *- Overview of NTCIR- What’s new in NTCIR-12- Task Introduction (5min x 8tasks)- Why participate?

- How to participate- Important Dates- Q&A* NTCIR-12 Tasks *CORE TASKS:
1. IMine-2: Search Intent Mining 2
2. MobileClick-2: Mobile Click 2
3. SpokenQuery&Doc-2: Spoken Query and Spoken Document Retrieval 2
4. Temporalia-2: Temporal Information Access 2
5. MedNLPDoc: Medical Natural Language Processing for Clinical Document
PILOT TASKS:
6. QALab-2: QA Lab for Entrance Exam 2
7. Lifelog: Personal Lifelog Access& Retrieval Task
8. STC: Short Text Conversation
NTCIR-12 Program Co-Chairs：- Makoto P. Kato (Kyoto Univ., Japan) and Kazuaki Kishida (Keio Univ., Japan)
NTCIR-12 General Co-Chairs：- Noriko Kando (NII, Japan), Tetsuya Sakai (Waseda Univ., Japan), Mark Sanderson (RMIT Univ., Australia)
Inquiry please contact NTCIR Project Office at: ntc-secretariat@nii.ac.jp