ＮＴＣＩＲ-12 Kick-off EventFeb. 27, 2015
English Session: 13:30Japanese Session: 15:15-

Program• Introduction to NTCIR• Outline of NTCIR-12• Presentation by Each Task
• How to participate• Q&A

Outline of NTCIR-12

Organization at NTCIR-12
GeneralCo-chairs

Participants
Task
Organizers

ProgramCommittee

General Co-chairs
Noriko Kando
National Institute of Informatics, Japan

Tetsuya Sakai
Waseda University, JapanMark Sanderson
The Royal Melbourne Institute ofTechnology, Australia

Program Committee (PC)
Hsin-Hsi Chen (National Taiwan University, Taiwan)
Charles Clarke (University of Waterloo, Canada)
Nicola Ferro (University of Padua, Italy)
Kalervo Järvelin (University of Tampere, Finland)
Gareth Jones (Dublin City University, Ireland)
Gary Geunbae Lee (POSTECH, South Korea)
Maarten de Rijke (University of Amsterdam, The Netherlands)
Mandar Mitra (Indian Statistical Institute, India)
Ian Soboroff (NIST, US)
Makoto P. Kato (Co-chair, Kyoto University, Japan)
Kazuaki Kishida (Co-chair, Keio University, Japan)

Focuses of NTCIR-12• 1) Advanced IR (Information Retrieval)techniques considering user’s context or
intents of finding information• 2) IA (Information Access) techniques tailoredto mobile computers• 3) IR and QA (Question answering) techniques
dependent on specific domains

Process of Task Selection• Call for Task Proposals– Nov., 2014

• Review & Selection by PC– Nov. to Dec., 2014

• 8 Tasks were accepted!
– 5 Core tasks– 3 Pilot tasks

Accepted NTCIR-12 Tasks
Context & IntentMobile

IMine-2
Temporalia-2

MobileClick-2
SpokenQuery&Doc-2

Specific Domains

STC

MedNLPDoc
QALab-2

Lifelog

Core Task

Pilot Task

General ScheduleFeb 27, 2015

Kick-off event in Tokyo

June 30,2015

Task registration due

July 01, 2015

Document set releaseJuly-Dec 2015

Dry runSep 2015 - Feb. 2016

Formal run

Feb 01, 2016

Evaluation results release

Contact TO forthe exact
schedule

Early draft Task Overview Release
Mar 01, 2016

Participant paper (draft) submission due

May 01, 2016

All camera-ready copy for the Proceedings due

07-10/June/2016

NTCIR-12 Conference, NII, Tokyo, Japan

10

How to participate
Simple six steps

11

How to participate
1. Read the task
description and CFP
carefully
2. Contact a TO if you
have questions
3. Decide a task toparticipate
4. Register as aparticipant at NTCIRwebsite

5. Fill in User Agreement
Forms
6. Keep an eye on atask’s ML, website,etc. to follow theactivity
Don’t hesitate
to send afeedback to TO

12

Participant’s agreement• Submit a paper to NTCIR-12 Conference– Demonstrate your systems and methods• Attend to the conference and give apresentation– Every group will give a poster presentation– Some will give an oral presentation, too13

Group ID policy• Group ID is independent of participating tasks– Please use the same Group ID if the groupmembers are identical, even if your group
participates in multiple tasks– Please use a different Group ID if the groupmembers are different across participating tasks• Group ID is first come first serve manner– NTCIR office might ask you to revise the name14

Why participate? (Students)• Perfect schedule• Easy start-up– Much of experimental
setup is provided– Performance measuresare (often) defined• Publications– Comparison with otherparticipants can produce
stronger arguments– Inspired by theinternational
community for future
work• Diverse tasks– Range of Information
access tasks to tackle15

Why participate? (Industry)• Establish your brand– To your end-users andcompetitors– Recruit smart people• Fair benchmarking– Comparison with yourown products can beless reproducible– Critical self-assessments• Faster development– Brush up your product oreliminating bugs in alimited period of time

• Early access to resulted
resources– Secondary resources
developed by the task
are yours, too16

Wrap-up• The eleventh cycle of NTCIR has started– Will conclude in June2016• Eight exciting tasks are running– Organised by leading researchers worldwide• Lots of opportunities for innovative work
– Exchange great ideas with the community• What’s missing is your participation!
17http://research.nii.ac.jp/ntcir/ntcir-12/

Thank you for your attention!
For further enquiries, contact the NTCIR officentc-secretariat nii.ac.jp

Q&A

18