NTCIR-17 Kick-off Event
September 28, 2022
13:00 – 14:30

Takehiro Yamamoto
University of Hyogo

Zhicheng DouRenmin University of China

Program Overview of NTCIR Overview of NTCIR-17
 Task Introduction (6 tasks)
 Why participate?
 How to participate
 Important Dates
Q&A

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Overview of NTCIR

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Overview of NTCIR-17

Organization at NTCIR-17
General Cochairs

Participants

TaskOrganizers

ProgramCommittee

5General Co-chairs
Charles L. A. Clarke
University of Waterloo, Canada

Noriko Kando

National Institute of Informatics, Japan

Makoto P. Kato
University of Tsukuba, JapanYiqun Liu

Tsinghua University, China

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NTCIR-17 Program Committee (PC)7

• Takehiro Yamamoto (Co-chair, University of Hyogo, Japan)• Zhicheng Dou (Co-chair, Renmin University of China, China)
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Chung-Chi Chen, National Institute of Advanced Industrial Science and Technology
Hsin-Hsi Chen, National Taiwan University
Gareth Jones, Dublin City University
Noriko Kando, National Institute of Informatics
Makoto P. Kato University of Tsukuba
Yiqun Liu, Tsinghua University
Alistair Moffat, The University of Melbourne
Jian-Yun Nie, University de Montreal
Douglas Oard, University of Maryland
Tetsuya Sakai, Waseda UniversityMark Sanderson, RMIT University
Ian Soboroff, NISTNTCIR-17 General Schedule
DateEventSep, 2022

NTCIR-17 Kickoff

Jan, 2023

Dataset Release*

may varyacrossmayvary acrosstasks
tasks

Jan-Jun, 2023

Dry Run*Mar-Jul, 2023

Formal Run*

Aug 1, 2023

Evaluation Result Release to the participants

Aug 1, 2023

Draft task overview paper releaseSep 1, 2022

Submission due of participant papers

Nov 1, 2023

Camera-ready participant paper due

Dec 12-15, 2023

NTCIR-17 at NII (+Hybrid)

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Highlight of NTCIR-17
6 exciting tasks
1. Modern IR tasks such as Fairness and Dense Retrieval
Fairness in IR

Dense Retrieval

FairWeb-1

Transfer

2. Deep NLP tasks in specialized domains
MedicalFinance
FinArg-1

MedNLP-SC
UFOPolitics
QA LabPoliInfo-4

9NTCIR-17 Tasks
CORE TASKS
1. FinArg-1

Fine-grained Argument Understanding inFinancial Analysis

2. MedNLP-SC:

Medial Natural Language Processing forSocial media and Clinical texts

3. QA Lab-PoliInfo-4 QA Lab for Political Information-4

PILOT TASKS
4. FairWeb-1

The Fair Web Task

5. Transfer:

Resource Transfer Based Dense Retrieval

6. UFO

Understanding of non-Financial Objects in
Financial Reports

1011Task Introduction fromTask Organizers

NTCIR-17 Tasks
CORE TASKS
1. FinArg-1

Fine-grained Argument Understanding in
Financial Analysis

2. MedNLP-SC:

Medial Natural Language Processing forSocial media and Clinical texts

3. QA Lab-PoliInfo-4 QA Lab for Political Information-4

PILOT TASKS
4. FairWeb-1

The Fair Web Task

5. Transfer:

Resource Transfer Based Dense Retrieval

6. UFO

Understanding of non-Financial Objects in
Financial Reports

1213How to participate

How to participate14

1. Read the task description
and CFP carefully

5. Fill in User Agreement
Forms

2. Contact task organizers
if you have questions

6. Keep an eye on a task’s
ML, website, etc. tofollow the activity

3. Decide a task toparticipate
4. Register as a participant at
NTCIR website

Don’t hesitate to send a
feedback totask organizers

What Participants Must Do
1. Submit your runs
2. Submit a paper to NTCIR-17 Conference– Demonstrate your systems and methods
3. Attend the NTCIR-17 conference
and give a presentation– Every group will give a poster presentation– Some will give an oral presentation, too– NTCIR-17 Conference will be hybrid

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Why participate? (Students)
 Easy start-up– Much of experimental
setup is provided– Performance measuresare (often) defined Increase your visibility– Demonstration of youridea and achievement for
academics and industries

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 Publications– Comparison with otherparticipants can produce
stronger arguments– Inspired by theinternational community
for future work Diverse tasks– A variety of Information
access tasks to tackle

Why participate? (Industry)
 Establish your brand– To your end-users andcompetitors– Recruit smart people Fair benchmarking– Comparison with yourown products can beless reproducible– Critical selfassessments

 Faster development– Brushing up yourproduct or eliminatingbugs in a limited periodof time Early access to resultantresources– Secondary resources
developed by the task
are yours, too17

Wrap-up
 The 17th cycle of NTCIR has started– Will conclude in December 2023

 6 exciting tasks are running– Organized by leading researchers worldwide

 Lots of opportunities for innovative work
– Exchange great ideas with the community

What we need is your participation!

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http://research.nii.ac.jp/ntcir/ntcir-17/

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

Q & A?