- T. Mitamura, N. Kando, Koichi Takeda. 2012. Introduction to the Special Issue on RITE. Abstract: INTRODUCTION The NTCIR1 Workshop is a series of evaluation workshops designed to enhance research in information access technologies, such as information retrieval, question answering, summarization, and text mining. The main goal of the NTCIR project is to provide infrastructure for large-scale evaluations of information access technologies, and then to speed up the research and the technology transfer. The major components of the infrastructure are reusable test collections, evaluation metrics, and a forum for researchers. As the fundamental text processing in information access technologies, such as indexing, which includes language-dependent procedures, the NTCIR workshop has placed emphasis on, but has not limited it to, East Asian languages, such as Japanese, Chinese, and Korean, (and English documents published in Asia), and its series of workshops has attracted international participation. An NTCIR workshop is held once every year and a half. In NTCIR, which is different from ordinary scientific conferences, the organizers and participating research groups have worked together in the process before the final meeting. The task organizers propose the tasks, the data sets used for experiments, and the evaluation metrics and methods and each of the participating research groups can participate for their own purposes and targets, and conduct research and experiments using the same data set provided by NTCIR. The experimental results are collected, and analyses and crosssystem comparisons are reported on at the final meeting. After the meeting, most of the test collections constructed through the NTCIR workshop are made available to non-participating research groups for research purposes. NTCIR-9, the ninth verion of the NTCIR, started its call for task participation from September 2010 and concluded the activities by the workshop held on 6th–9th December 2011, in Tokyo, Japan [Sakai and Joho 2011].
