Preface
The Seventh NTCIR Workshop (NTCIR-7) is the latest in the evaluation workshop series designed toenhance research in information access technologies, including text retrieval, cross-language information access,question-answering, information extraction, text mining, etc., using texts in East Asian-languages such as
Japanese, Chinese, and Korean and English. This is a community-based effort building a research infrastructure
for evaluation and testing information access technologies.
The goals of the NTCIR Workshops are:
1. Encourage research in information access technologies by providing research infrastructures forevaluation and testing,
2. Provide a forum for research groups for exchanging research ideas, and3. Investigate methodologies and metrics for evaluation of information access technologies.
The term “information access” includes the whole process of making information in documents usable byusers. It includes document retrieval from vast collections of documents, and the technologies to support users
in utilizing information in the retrieved documents. Research and development of information accesstechnologies require solid evidences based on experiments to show the superiority of newly proposedmechanisms over previous ones. A test collection is a data set used for such testing and a major component of
the infrastructure. NTCIR Workshops aim to serve for those areas and wide-ranging insights have been
produced as results.
NTCIR-7 Program Committee reviewed task proposals and suggested to merge related ones. The following
research areas were selected as “tasks”, and organized into the clusters.
Cluster 1: Advanced Cross-Lingual Information Access (ACLIA)
Complex Cross-Lingual Question Answering (CCLQA) task
Information Retrieval for Question Answering (IR4QA) task
Cluster 2: User Generated ContentsMultilingual Opinion Analysis Task (MOAT)
Cluster 3: Focused Domain (Patent)
Patent Mining (PAT MN) task
Patent Translation (PAT MT) task
Cluster 4: Multimodal Summarization of Trend (MuST)
Each task was coordinated and organized by the task organizers, a group of researchers of the topic. Eachcluster originally planned to include mono- and cross-lingual information retrieval (CLIR) components1, anddesigned module-based experiments in a cluster. Participants are welcome to participate in end-to-end
evaluation in a cluster as well as evaluation in particular task/module in the cluster.
NTCIR-7 Research Planning and Coordinating Committee consisted of the coordinators of each cluster anda liaison from the program committee, and has led the activities for NTCIR-7. The call-for-task-participation in
NTCIR-7 started in September 2007, and the final meeting is held on 16-19 December 2008, at NII, Tokyo. We
consider the workshop to be the whole process from the call for participation in the experiments and evaluationof the tasks set by NTCIR to the final meeting.
A hundred and eighty-seven research groups registered and conducted the tasks set by the organizers, but
unfortunately many groups could not continue their participation for various reasons. Eighty-two researchgroups from fifteen different countries and areas completed the experiments in time and remained as the “activeparticipants”. We plan to survey the reasons why so many gave up, and hope to learn from this experience to1

CLIR on Blog task in the Cluster 2 was cancelled, so there was no retrieval component for Cluster 2 outside of theoptional sentence-level topic relevance subtask.

―i―improve future NTCIR Evaluation Workshops. One piece of good news for NTCIR was that we have a large
number of new participants.
The Second International Workshop on Evaluating Information Access (EVIA2008) is organized by two
program co-chairs, Mark Sanderson and Tetsuya Sakai, as a refereed workshop that welcomes submissions fromboth the NTCIR task participants and individuals not involved in the NTCIR tasks. It contributed to enlarge theNTCIR community and we expect it to provide a wider forum to discuss related topics and research leading tofuture NTCIR tasks.
This volume contains the reports of the experiments and investigations performed within NTCIR-7, and thepapers presented at EVIA are in a separate volume.
Technologies and social networking environments are rapidly changing and gaining enhanced functionality.
It is obvious that the Web has become a valuable information resource, and the importance of information
retrieval and access technologies has greatly increased to improve the quality of life for individuals; how toretrieve, how to create intelligence from the retrieved information, how to “weave out” the knowledge fromsuch a vast collection of information, and how to utilize them – the technologies to support these activities arekeys for a better society. Although NTCIR has worked on the aspects without interaction with users, which hasprovided a more reliable, sensible and stable evaluation and testing environment that has sped up technologicaltransfer from research ideas into real-world applications, we have to tackle more complicated tasks to evaluate
interactive and exploratory search which is critical to the process of information retrieval and access.
NTCIR-7 and EVIA 2008 are sponsored by the National Institute of Informatics (NII). CCLQA is partially
supported by NII Joint Research Grant. PAT MT is partially supported by National Institute of Information andCommunications Technology and NII Joint Research Grant. MuST is supported by joint Research Grant ofNippon Telegraph and Telephone, Corp., the University of Tokyo, and a NII Joint Research Grant.
We are extremely grateful to the following organizations for their understanding of the project and forproviding substantial support in various forms: Central Daily News, China Daily News, China Times Inc.,
Industrial Property Cooperation Center, Japan Intellectual Property Association, Japan Parent Office, Japan
Patent Information Organization, Korea Economic Daily, Linguistic Data Consortium, Mainichi Newspapers,
Nippon Database Kaihatsu, Co. Ltd., the Sing Tao Group, Singapore Press Holding, Taiwan News, UDN.COM,and Yahoo! Japan. We are thankful to the Program Committee members, Advisory Committee members, theNTCIR-7 Research Planning and Coordinating Committee members, and the EVIA Program Committeemembers. We are thankful to Ellen Voorhees and Donna Harman, the National Institute of Standards andTechnology, USA, and to Carol Peters and CLEF, the Cross-Language Evaluation Forum, for their support,advises and collaboration on various occasions. I thank for the NTCIR-7 program committee members, cluster
coordinators and the task organizers for their hard work. Thanks for the task participants for scientific input andcooperation for the task organization. Especially I would like to draw attention that many of the task
participants volunteered to join the dataset creation. I appreciated their great contribution and found that would
be promising direction to the things put forwards in this community-based activity. I would like to thank Miho
Sugimoto, Tetsuya Sakai, and Molin Du for information logistics for both printed and online proceedings andfor the meeting, and Ruiko Homma, Miho Sugimoto, and Fumiko Koiwahara for their supports behind for
entire process of NTCIR-7.
I do hope each of the participants will enjoy presenting their research results and discussing with each otherat the Meeting, and such an occasion will lead to fruitful collaboration and research enhancement.
December 2008

Noriko Kando
Program Chair of the Seventh NTCIR Workshop
National Institute of Informatics― ii ―