CALL FOR NTCIR‐12 TASK PROPOSALS(DEADLINE: November 21, 2014)
NTCIR (NII Testbeds and Community for Information access Research) is asesquiannual series of evaluation conferences that mainly focuses on Asian language
informationaccess.

ThefirstNTCIR

conference(NTCIR-1)

tookplacein

August/September 1999, and the latest NTCIR-11 conference will take place inDecember 2014. Research teams from all over the world participate in one or more ofthe NTCIR tasks to advance the state of the art and to learn from one another'sexperiences.
http://research.nii.ac.jp/ntcir/ntcir-11/index.html
As the tasks being run at NTCIR-11 are reaching the final stages, it is time to call fortasks for the next NTCIR (NTCIR-12) which will start in January 2015 and conclude inJune 2016. Task proposals will be reviewed by the NTCIR Programme Committee,
following the schedule below:
IMPORTANT DATES:
November 21, 2014 Deadline for task proposals (new and existing tasks)
December 9-12, 2014 Task planning session at NTCIR-11 Conference (optional) **If you wish to have the session, please send an e-mail to ntc11-pcc@nii.ac.jp ASAP.
December 9-12, 2014 Proposal presentation at NTCIR-11 Conference (optional)
December 16, 2014 Notification of accepted tasks
Organizers of existing NTCIR-11 tasks (iMine, Math-2, MedNLP-2, MobileClick,RITE-VAL, SpokenQuery&Doc, QALab, Temporalia, and RecipeSearch) are required tosubmit a new proposal if they wish to continue them for NTCIR-12. New task proposals
are also very welcome. To organize an evaluation task is to identify important research
problems, tackle

themstrategicallybycollaboratingwithotherresearchers(participants), build the necessary evaluation framework to advance the state of the art,and make an impact to the research community and to the future.
If you plan to use a new data set and wish to distribute via NTCIR, please contact
NTCIR office as soon as possible.
We will accept two types of tasks:

- Core challenge task: this is for fostering research on a particular information accessproblem by providing researchers with a common ground for evaluation. New testcollections and evaluation methods may be developed through the collaboration
between task organizers (proposers) and the task participants. At NTCIR-11, the core
challenge tasks were: iMine, Math-2, MedNLP-2, MobileClick, RITE-VAL, andSpokenQuery&Doc.
- Pilot task: this is recommended if the information access problem to be tackled is newand there are uncertainties as to how to evaluate it. It may focus on a sub-problem of an
information access problem. It may attract a smaller group of participating teams thancore challenge task, but may grow into a core challenge task in the next round of NTCIR.
At NTCIR-11, the pilot tasks were: QALab, Temporalia, and RecipeSearch
NTCIR will provide a "seed funding" to each accepted task, which can be used for some
limited purposes such as hiring relevance assessors. However, organizers of each task
are expected to make the task as self-sustaining as possible. The amount allocated toeach task will vary depending on requirements and the total number of accepted tasks,
but typical cases would be: around 1M JPY/year for a core challenge task and around
0.5M JPY/year for a pilot task (note that the amount may be changed in NTCIR-12).
Please submit your task proposal as a pdf to the following EasyChair site by November
21, 2014 (Hawaii Time GMT-10).
https://www.easychair.org/conferences/?conf=ntcir12tp

TASK PROPOSAL FORMAT:
Main part (a single A4 page)- Task name and short name- Task type (core challenge or pilot)- Abstract- Motivation- Methodology- Expected results
Appendix- Names and contact information of the organizers- Prospective participants- Data to be used and/or constructed- Budget planning- Schedule- Other notes
REVIEW CRITERIA:- Importance of the task to the information access community and to the society- Timeliness of the task
- Organizers’ commitment in ensuring a successful task
- Financial sustainability (self-sustainable tasks are encouraged)- Soundness of the evaluation methodology- Language scope
NTCIR-12 PROGRAMME COMMITTEE*The following list is tentative. The members may be changed.
Hsin-Hsi Chen (National Taiwan University, Taiwan)
Charles Clarke (University of Waterloo, Canada)
Nicola Ferro (University of Padua, Italy)
Kalervo Jarvelin (University of Tampere, Finland)
Gareth Jones (Dublin City University, Ireland)
Gary Geunbae Lee (POSTECH, South Korea)
Mandar Mitra (Indian Statistical Institute, India)
Maarten de Rijke (University of Amsterdam, The Netherlands)
Ian Soboroff (NIST, US)
Kazuaki Kishida (Co-chair, Keio University, Japan)
NTCIR GENERAL CHAIRS:
Noriko Kando (NII, Japan)
Tsuneaki Kato (The University of Tokyo, Japan)
Douglas W. Oard (University of Maryland, USA)
Tetsuya Sakai (Waseda University, Japan)
Mark Sanderson (RMIT, Australia)