This open access book summarizes the first two decades of the NII
Testbeds and Community for Information access Research (NTCIR). NTCIR is
a series of evaluation forums run by a global team of researchers and
hosted by the National Institute of Informatics (NII), Japan. The book
is unique in that it discusses not just what was done at NTCIR, but also
how it was done and the impact it has achieved. For example, in some
chapters the reader sees the early seeds of what eventually grew to be
the search engines that provide access to content on the World Wide Web,
today's smartphones that can tailor what they show to the needs of their
owners, and the smart speakers that enrich our lives at home and on the
move. We also get glimpses into how new search engines can be built for
mathematical formulae, or for the digital record of a lived human life.
Key to the success of the NTCIR endeavor was early recognition that
information access research is an empirical discipline and that
evaluation therefore lay at the core of the enterprise. Evaluation is
thus at the heart of each chapter in this book. They show, for example,
how the recognition that some documents are more important than others
has shaped thinking about evaluation design. The thirty-three
contributors to this volume speak for the many hundreds of researchers
from dozens of countries around the world who together shaped NTCIR as
organizers and participants.
This book is suitable for researchers, practitioners, and
students--anyone who wants to learn about past and present evaluation
efforts in information retrieval, information access, and natural
language processing, as well as those who want to participate in an
evaluation task or even to design and organize one.
