Overview of the Eighth NTCIR Workshop

For the Eighth NTCIR Workshop (NTCIR-8), we selected and organized seven research areas as “tasks” to investigate, test and benchmark newly constructed test collections. These areas are Complex Cross-Lingual Question Answering (CCLQA), Information Retrieval for Question Answering (IR4QA), Geographic and Temporal Search (GeoTime), Multilingual Opinion Analysis (MOAT), Patent Machine Translation (PATMT), Patent Mining (PATMN) and a pilot task for Community Question Answering (CQA). Among these, GeoTime and CQA are new to NTCIR and the others have some new elements. Each task had its own challenge to tackle and both organizers and participating research groups worked hard towards completing them. This paper provides an overview of the Eighth NTCIR Workshop, which is the latest in a series of communityoriented efforts to enhance related research by providing infrastructure for evaluation and testing, as well as a forum for researchers. The paper briefly describes the background, tasks, participants, test collections and other resources available through NTCIR-8. It is intended to serve as an introduction to the research described in detail in the full Proceedings of the Eighth NTCIR Workshop