Dear colleagues, *Apologies in advance if you receive this message multiple times, as we are sharing this announcement across several mailing lists. We are delighted to send you call for NTCIR-19 participants. NTCIR (NII Testbeds and Community for Information Access Research) is a series of evaluation conferences that mainly focus on information access with East Asian languages and English. The first NTCIR conference (NTCIR-1) took place in August/September 1999, and the latest NTCIR-18 conference was held in June 2025. This round, we have 14 interesting tasks (https://research.nii.ac.jp/ntcir/ntcir-19/tasks.html), and the topics cover argumentation, LLMs, IR, biomedical NLP, and financial NLP among others. We also have travel support for some participants every year. Hope you can find some topics that you are also interested in and join NTCIR in December 2026 in Tokyo. Below are more details about NTCIR-19. Feel free to contact us if you have any questions. Best Regards, Ramon on behalf of the NTCIR-19 Publicity Co-chairs ■□■───────────────────────────────────────────■□■ CALL FOR NTCIR-19 TASK PARTICIPATION　　　 ■□■───────────────────────────────────────────■□■ NTCIR-19 (Dec 8-10, 2026, Tokyo, Japan) now calls for task participation of anyone interested in research on information access technologies and their evaluation, such as retrieval from a large amount of document collections, question answering and natural language processing. We welcome students, young researchers, professors who supervise students, researchers working for a company, and anyone who is interested in informatics. -------------------------------------------------- ■ What is NTCIR? -------------------------------------------------- NTCIR (NII Testbeds and Community for Information Access Research) is a project aimed at creating a large-scale evaluation framework for technologies that facilitate access to desired information, understanding, and utilization from vast amounts of data. These technologies include information retrieval, question answering, summarization, text mining, and machine translation. It provides a shared common foundation for numerous researchers both domestically and internationally, enabling them to advance their respective research, conduct validation and comparative evaluations, and learn from one another within a collaborative forum. Since it started in 1998, NTCIR has been striving to realize richer information access technologies and create future value. The project operates on a cycle of 1.5 years, during which several tasks (research areas) are selected for focused activities. -------------------------------------------------- ■ NTCIR-19 Tasks -------------------------------------------------- NTCIR-19 Program Committee has selected 14 tasks. The overview slide of each task can be available at the kick-off page: https://research.nii.ac.jp/ntcir/ntcir-19/kickoffcfp.html For more details, please visit the websites of each task: Task Overview page: https://research.nii.ac.jp/ntcir/ntcir-19/tasks.html -------------------------------------------------- == Core Tasks == - AEOLLM-2: Automatic Evaluation of LLMs 2 https://huggingface.co/spaces/THUIR/AEOLLM - FinArg-3: Argument Quality Assessment of Financial Forward-Looking Statements https://sites.google.com/nlg.csie.ntu.edu.tw/finarg3/ - HIDDEN-RAD2: Hidden Causal Reasoning in Radiology Report Generation https://sites.google.com/view/hidden-rad2/ - Lifelog-7: Advancing Lifelog Analytics and Retrieval at NTCIR19 https://lifelog-ntcir-project-bd9eae.gitlab.io/ - MedNLP-CALL: Medical Natural Language Processing for Emergency Call https://sociocom.naist.jp/mednlp-call/ - ToT: Tip-of-the-Tongue https://ntcir-tot.github.io/ == Pilot Tasks == - AgenticInstruction: Instruction Generation for Agentic Search https://geniie-lab.github.io/ntcir/ - CAMEO: Composed Access to Multimodal E-commerce Objects https://sites.google.com/view/ntcir-cameo26/ - DAGRI: Data Analytics for aGRicultural Information https://sites.google.com/view/dagri/ - FEHU: Fact-based Event-centric Human-value Understanding https://sites.google.com/view/ntcir19fehu - ModelRetrieval: Pre-trained Model Retrieval https://pre-trained-model-retrieval.github.io/ - R2C2: RAG Responses Confident and Correct? http://sakailab.com/r2c2/ - RegCom: Multinational, Multilingual, Multi-Industry Regulatory Compliance Checking https://sites.google.com/view/ntcir19regcom/ - SciClaimEval: Cross-modal Claim Verification in Scientific Papers https://sciclaimeval.github.io/ -------------------------------------------------- ■ How to Participate -------------------------------------------------- 1. Please carefully read "How to Participate to NTCIR-19 Task(s)": https://research.nii.ac.jp/ntcir/ntcir-19/howto.html 2. Please register at https://research.nii.ac.jp/ntcir/ntcir-19/howto.html The datasets of each task will be delivered to the team after registration (the date may vary depending on the task). -------------------------------------------------- ■ Registration Due (Depend on the task) - Apr 17, 2026 R2C2: RAG Responses Confident and Correct? - May 12, 2026 Lifelog-7: Advancing Lifelog Analytics and Retrieval at NTCIR19 - Jun 1, 2026 AgenticInstruction: Instruction Generation for Agentic Search DAGRI: Data Analytics for aGRicultural Information FEHU: Fact-based Event-centric Human-value Understanding ModelRetrieval: Pre-trained Model Retrieval RegCom: Multinational, Multilingual, Multi-Industry Regulatory Compliance Checking SciClaimEval: Cross-modal Claim Verification in Scientific Papers ToT: Tip-of-the-Tongue - Jul 1, 2026 MedNLP-CALL: Medical Natural Language Processing for Emergency Call - Jul 10, 2026 AEOLLM-2: Automatic Evaluation of LLMs 2 CAMEO: Composed Access to Multimodal E-commerce Objects FinArg-3: Argument Quality Assessment of Financial Forward-Looking Statements HIDDEN-RAD2: Hidden Causal Reasoning in Radiology Report Generation -------------------------------------------------- ■ Schedule -------------------------------------------------- (*Schedule can be different in different tasks. Please visit webpages of each task for the details.) Jan-Jun 2026 Dry run* Mar-Jul 2026 Formal run* Aug 1, 2026 Evaluation results return / Task overview release (draft) Sep 1, 2026 Submission due of participant papers (draft) Nov 1, 2026 Camera-ready participant paper due Dec 8-10, 2026 NTCIR-19 Conference (Tokyo, NII) (At the NTCIR-19 Conference, an online presentation will be available) -------------------------------------------------- ■ Questions? -------------------------------------------------- For information regarding the task specifications etc., please contact the NTCIR Program Chairs: ntc19-pcc@nii.ac.jp<mailto:ntc19-pcc@nii.ac.jp> or task organizers. For information regarding the online registration and previous NTCIR test collections, please contact the NTCIR office: ntc-secretariat@nii.ac.jp<mailto:ntc-secretariat@nii.ac.jp> We are looking forward to your participation! [University of Dundee shield logo]<http://uod.ac.uk/sig-home> Dr Ramon Ruiz-Dolz Lecturer (Teaching and Research) | Open Research Lead Member of the ELLIS Society<https://ellis.eu/person/ramon-ruiz-dolz> | AFHEA School of Science and Engineering, University of Dundee rruizdolz001@dundee.ac.uk<mailto:rruizdolz001@dundee.ac.uk> | raruidol.github.io<http://raruidol.github.io/> Your Dundee, your University. At the heart of the city since 1881<http://uod.ac.uk/sig-strapline> University of Dundee, Nethergate, Dundee, Scotland, UK, DD1 4HN The University of Dundee is a registered Scottish Charity, No: SC015096