Message from the Program Chair

The Third NTCIR Workshop is the third venture in a series of evaluation workshops designed to enhance research in information access technologies including text retrieval, cross language information retrieval, automatic text summarization, information extraction, and question answering on Japanese and Asian language text. The goals of the NTCIR Workshops are as follows: 1. to encourage research in information access technologies by providing large-scale test collections reusable for experiments and common evaluation infrastructures, 2. to provide a forum of research groups interested in cross-system comparison and exchanging research ideas, and 3. to investigate a) methodologies and metrics for evaluation of information access technologies and b) methods for constructing large-scale reusable test collections. With the rapid growth of the Internet, the importance of research in information access technologies is increasing greatly. A term "information access" includes a whole process to make information in the documents usable to users and we have looked at the technologies to support users to utilize the information in the documents in a vast collection of various types of documents for various tasks. Research and development of information access technologies requires solid evidence based on experiments to show the superiority of the proposed system and/or strategy over previous ones. A test collection is a data set used for such testing. The importance of the large-scale test collections in this research and the forum for researchers to learn each other is widely recognized. We hope the NTCIR Workshop serves as one such opportunity, and that wide-ranging insight has been produced as a result of the Workshop. The Third NTCIR Workshop started with the document data distribution in October 2001 and its Meeting was held on 8-10 October 2002, NII, Tokyo. We call the whole process from document distribution to the meeting as workshop since we have placed emphasis on the interaction and collaboration among participants and organizers through this activity. It hosted five tasks; This was the first NTCIR workshop for PATENT, QAC, and WEB. CLIR and TSC included new subtasks. A new challenging task was termed a "challenge" in the NTCIR. However, we found that all five tasks contained new and unique challenging issues regarding research and development of the technologies as well as their evaluation and test collection construction, and therefore each task was a "challenge" for both the participants and the task organizers. Each task was coordinated and organized by the task organizers, a group of …