Report on NTCIR-13: The Thirteenth Round of NII Testbeds and Community for Information Access Research

This is a report on the NTCIR-13 conference held in December 2017, in Tokyo, Japan. NTCIR is a series of parallel and collective evaluation efforts designed to enhance research on diverse information access technologies, including, but not limited to, cross-language and multimedia information access, question-answering, text mining and summarization, with an emphasis on East Asian languages such as Chinese, Korean, and Japanese, as well as English. 105 different research groups from 20 countries/regions participated in one or more of the nine different tasks in NTCIR-13, to compete and collaborate on a common ground and thereby advance the state of the art. This report introduces the highlights of the conference, describes the scope and task designs of nine tasks organized at NTCIR-13, and provides a brief introduction to NTCIR-14, which started from January 2018 and will be closed in June 2019, which will be the 20th anniversary since the first NTCIR Conference in the summer of 1999.