Preface from NTCIR-10 General Chairs

Emphasis has been placed on East Asian languages, but it has attracted international participation outside. Each NTCIR is an ongoing process that takes place over the course of 18 months. NTCIR-10 plays host to the tasks listed below. The activities of each task are coordinated by 55 volunteer task organizers combined with central coordination by the program co-chairs Hideo Joho and Tetsuya Sakai. A hundred and twenty-five research groups registered for one or more tasks and have conducted experiments using the common data sets and experimental designs set for each so that participants can compare the effectiveness of the results and learn from each other. One hundred and five research groups from 13 different countries/regions submitted the results for one or more tasks and have conducted experiments. This round we have one of the highest number of participating teams in the history of NTCIR. EVIA 2013, which was organized by two co-chairs, William Webber and Ruihua Song, is a refereed workshop that welcomes submissions from both NTCIR-10 task participants and individuals not involved in the tasks. This workshop enlarges the NTCIR community, and we expect it to provide a wider forum to discuss related topics and research leading to future NTCIR tasks as well as future information access technology research. The Conference of the NTCIR-10 and EVIA 2012 are organized by the NTCIR-10 Organizing Committee and the National Institute of Informatics (NII). We are extremely grateful to the sponsors, which are listed in the conference program and Website. Their generous support has enabled us to help promising young researchers and students to travel to the Conference. for providing the examination data and the textbook corpus for Exam Subtask of RITE; Special interest group of spoken language processing (SIG-SLP), the Information Processing Society of Japan, and National Institute of Language and Linguistics for the Corpus of Spontenous Japanese (CSJ) for SpokenDoc; and NII's Joint Research Grant for several tasks. We are grateful for the Program Committees of NTCIR-10 and EVIA 2013, and for the task organizers of the NTCIR-10 and their organizations for the understanding that has enabled them to act as task organizers. In addition, several of the NTCIR-10 task organizers served as the editors of this volume and provided feedback on the papers submitted by the participants. Many of the task participants volunteered to help with the dataset creation, and we appreciate their great contribution to this community-based activity. …