Preface from the Program Chair

The Second NTCIR Workshop was the second in a series of evaluation workshops designed to enhance research in Japanese and Asian language text retrieval and related text processing technology such as summarization and extraction. The participating groups enrolled for the Workshop by 31 July 2000 and the results were presented at the Meeting, held in Tokyo, 7-9 March 2001. It was the first challenge to host tasks organized by separate groups outside the National Institute of Informatics (NII) and resulted in adding a variety of tasks. It was also the first experience to be organized under the support of the Research Center of the Information Resources (Director: Jun Adachi), which was launched as part of the NII in April 2000.